This is a meal plan based on the the typical meals that I actually cook on a regular basis. It is not an exact diary of what we eat, but it’s pretty darn close. Enjoy!
Monday – Barbecue Grilled Chicken Salad with black beans
Tuesday – Sausage, Tomato & Bean Stew
Wednesday – Slow Cooker Split Pea Soup
Thursday – Lamb Shepard’s Pie
Friday – Herb Roasted Tomatoes over Chicken with salad and lentils
Many times healthy diets can be pretty costly, and I’m always looking to save as much as possible while not compromising my diet. I was pleasantly surprised after adding up the totals for January and realizing just how much money we saved while we were doing the Geek to Freak Challenge.
We spent a total of $198.04 for the entire month of January on groceries. That is the least we have spent on groceries since summer. I also want to point out that we ate out at least once on our cheat days, and I fed a multitude of guests throughout the month. I like to entertain, but I don’t separate the cost of those meals from our regular grocery budget. I also don’t use coupons (don’t hate).
The most obvious money savings came from drinks. I typically only drink water, tea and wine, with an occasional glass of juice or milk, but those are very rare for me. Chuck on the other hand goes through a gallon of both milk and juice weekly. Since we can’t have fruit or dairy on this diet we abstained from buying those items, along with yogurt, and cheese. In total these items added somewhere around $15 to our weekly grocery bill which computes to $60 a month. Since my friends and family know I love wine and tea it is often gifted to me, so I haven’t had to buy tea in over a year, similarly for wine I was able to drink mostly the wine that was gifted to me for Christmas. It pays have simple pleasures people!
Bread items were hands down the second largest savings area. A loaf of sourdough for my favorite stuffing, cheese garlic bread on Friday nights, and pasta all add up and cost more per pound than dried beans and lentils, which have some cost savings all their own.
Switching to dried beans was another great place for savings. Since we were eating so many more beans I thought it would be worth it to try to cook my own from dry stock, and let me tell you, it totally was. A single 1 lb bag of beans costs about $1.39 near me, while a can costs $0.79. Each bag contains 4 to 5 cans, meaning that $1.77 to $2.56 is saved by cooking with dried beans. Once cooked the beans can be used throughout the week, canned, or frozen. If you aren’t eating beans or lentils daily this might not be worth it for you, but this is one place of savings that Chuck and I are going to continue going forward. I estimate that over the course of the month we saved over $6 on black beans alone so in a year that will look like almost $75 on just black beans.
One place that might be difficult for some to save money is on vegetables. This diet is vegetable heavy, and lucky for us we already eat a lot of vegetables, so the only thing that was really added was an extra bag of spinach a week. If you don’t eat that many vegetables before making the switch to this type of diet then this would probably increase your budget quite a bit.
I think it’s also pretty important to point out that we ate most of our meat from the freezer, which is something that happens pretty much all year round. Considering all of Chuck’s hunting permits/licenses, ammo etc. we figured the venison provided costs about $3.33 per lb. Once this cost is added in our total grocery budget comes to something like $230 which is more comparable to the average family of 2. While I think it’s important to be transparent about this stuff I’m apprehensive to add in the cost of the venison for my own records because while it does provide us with a lot of high quality food pretty inexpensively, hunting is Chuck’s hobby, prepping and preparing the catch is one our favorite things to do together. I don’t like to consider the cost of a hobby in our food cost, because if we didn’t hunt that same money would be spent on another hobby (skiing for example costs 3x what hunting cost’s us) since we are not sedentary people.
I also think it’s important to point out that this is January in the Northeast, so my gardens are not producing right now (I didn’t get myself together enough to have a winter garden this year), otherwise we would get a lot more produce for a fraction of the cost of the stuff we buy in the grocery store.
I’m guessing in the summer we could maintain this diet for something like $100 a month, and that’s with fresh, locally grown food. My guess is that my monthly average year round will be something like $200 dollars a month for food. I’m going to do my best to keep track of it and let you guys know how the math works out at the end of the year. To keep me accountable I will put the monthly totals in each months recently posts. January’s post has already been updated.
Related:
20 Awesome Slow Carb Recipes
How We Meal Plan
How to Reduce the Temptation of Take Out
Chuck and I spent the last 28 days attempting to follow the Tim Ferris Geek to Freak Challenge and the results have been pretty good despite intense cheese cravings (for me).
If you’ve been around here for a while you have heard me wine about my lack of motivation to stay fit as well as my constant battle with eating healthier. I really want to make some lasting changes so like everyone else does I decided to make a big change in January of 2016.
I decided to try this challenge because I need a jump start; a new way to think about food, and a new routine to work out with. I like Tim’s idea of using the Minimum Effective Dose (MED), which requires that workouts are done starting at twice weekly and further reduced as you get stronger. I am one who suffers from anxiety over my schedule, so trying to spend an hour in the gym daily just isn’t going to work for me, this on the other hand is something that I can do. The basic work out portion of the challenge is to workout 2x weekly using the one-set-to-failure principal and do no more than 4-7 multi-joint exercises (I used some combination of squat, dead lift, pull ups, bent row, bench, lunges, and over head press. These included a 5 minute warm up, stretch and cool down of 2-4 abdominal exercises.) Also complete each exercise with a 5/5 cadence.
For those interested in just losing weight, sticking to the Slow Carb Diet alone can do that, even without exercise, check out How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise or better yet read The 4 Hour Body
.
The main focus of this diet is vegetables and lean meats, the main carbs consumed come from beans, or lentils not grains, this is something that I can definitely improve on. I’m not going to tell you that grains are killing you, but let’s be serious, as delicious as my French Onion Gnocchi recipe is, eating just that for a few meals is not providing my body with the protein or vitamins that it really needs. The hardest part I knew would be dairy, not that I’m a milk drinker or anything, I just love me some cheese. Another tough thing for both me and Chuck was cutting out fruit since we both ate fruit multiple times a day.
If you are looking to really test your resolve on a new diet try starting it while you are sick and only want chicken noodle soup. The first 2 days were hard, I was already sick of beans and lentils, but day three came on and I kind of stopped caring. I was full without feeling over-full, sick, or bloated, a miracle in the midst of the cold that I was nursing at the time. I felt good and was ready to keep going, until the day before cheat day. Being a food blogger can have it’s downfalls, for example researching new recipes when you can’t eat a lot of things. Needless to say Chuck and I both went a little overboard on our cheat days. So much so that it actually felt good to back on the diet on Sunday. That same pattern continued throughout the challenge, cravings are easy to deal with knowing there’s a cheat day right around the corner. Chuck had the easiest time of all. Eating the same meals all the time is easy for him, and he was happy to stick to the diet for the majority of the time.
This is what our diet looked like:
**Keep in mind that I am also a part time vegetarian so my protein sources before dinner during this diet were usually nuts, beans or eggs where as someone else could go with meat instead.
***I chose venison as the main lean meat for this diet (including my homemade sausages), because we have a lot of that around here, but grass fed-organic beef, lamb, or pork are also ok on the diet.
Breakfast:
I ate basically the same thing every day for breakfast every day 2 eggs, spinach, and black beans occasionally with salsa. Chuck’s typical breakfast was similar with a lot more salsa and venison sausage crumbles.
Lunch:
Lunches only varied a little from my usual salads and sandwiches. I ate a lot more taco salads, and when I wanted something different I made a few quick veggie lentil soups, occasionally I had leftovers as well, but those are really Chuck’s Jam.
Dinner: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4
As per usual we didn’t vary very far from the meal plans that I provide here on the blog, except the occasional busy day when tuna salad lettuce boats were used instead (tuna’s always my last minute go to).
Snacks: celery & peanut butter, veggies & hummus, nuts, toasted chickpeas, or hard boiled eggs (sorry I rarely took pictures of these)
Restaurants that work well with the diet: Ruby Tuesdays, Chilis, Burrito Places (Moes, Hot Harry’s ect.), Local Diners (they have lots of options)
My Results:
Left Jan. 3rd, Right Jan 30th
January 3rd
Mid Bicep 11″
Upper Chest 36″
Waist 31″
Hips 40″
Mid-Thigh 23″
Weight 152 lbs
Left Jan. 3rd, Right Jan 30th
January 30th
Mid Bicep 10 3/4″
Upper Chest 36″
Waist 29 1/2″
Hips 39 1/2″
Mid-Thigh 22 1/2″
Weight 145 lbs
Not pictured are Chuck’s results, while he didn’t do the work out portion he lost roughly 10 lbs and lots of inches using just the slow carb diet. It’s a shame but he’s just not into sharing his life on the internet like I am.
I think these results after only 28 days are pretty darn good. I dropped almost 5% of my body weight (mostly fat) and already feel stronger. I also feel a lot more confident and my jeans fit again. I think the results for us both are pretty awesome for only 4 weeks time. I am a little disappointed that I lost size in places like my arms, where I was kind of hoping to gain some muscle, but perhaps I need another month of working out. There are many people that follow this diet year round and have great success with it. Chuck even want’s to continue doing it. And I say thanks but no thanks, I liked the challenge, I would do it again, and probably will a few times a year, but I personally need more variety in my life, and potatoes (I like potatoes). As for the work out portion I could have definitely done better, being sick the first week (notice my reindeer nose in the pictures) I did not start working out until the second week. I liked the idea of only working out twice a week or less, and will probably continue this going forward.
Reading The 4 Hour Body. and then falling down the subsequent diet and health rabbit hole that I’ve been in for a month has done quite a bit to change and reinforce much of my food philosophy. Before this challenge I thought I was doing well at eating a mostly plant diet. I had already increased the variety and number of vegetables I ate in a day by at least double just from switching to Part Time Vegetarianism. I was eating less meat and less processed foods than ever before. This challenge however showed me just how much I had been lying to myself. Yes we ate vegetables often, much more than the average American, but we still “filled up” on starches, potatoes, rice, pasta. Those things were in each and every meal I made, for the last 30 days (aside from cheat days) I did not indulge in them. In those 30 days I was able to both lose weight, and save money while actually eating a plant based diet. This is something that I want to continue to do. I also want to open myself up to more variety. Our ancestors ate something like 3,000 different food items in a week, now you can barely find 300 different items in our grocery stores. I want to cook more slow food, using those often overlooked cuts of meat to slow roast, and braise getting all the good nutrients out of them. Opening up my vegetable options by picking things I don’t often eat, and shopping more often at the farmers market. I want to grow as much of my own food as possible, and forage more for what it locally available to me. I’m hoping that this will help me stay healthy and keep the weight off, while also promoting a more sustainable lifestyle. I also want to note that I saved so much money while on this challenge, but that’s a whole other post.
Now I have to think of a new challenge to start in March (because I’m obsessed), maybe I’ll do the air squats before and after eating challenge, or a pull up challenge, or something? Got any ideas?
This is a meal plan based on the real meals that I cook at home weekly. To kick off the new year Chuck and I are taking on a new challenge and trying out the Slow Carb Diet. That means that the next few weeks of meal plans are going to be a direct reflection of that diet. This is week 3 (week 1, week 2)
Monday – Red Lentil Stuffed Peppers with Grilled Fajita Chicken (Use about 1/2 a tablespoon as a rub on the chicken)
Tuesday – Spanish Style Seafood Stew with Salad
Wednesday – Pantry Lemon Pepper & Herb Chicken over Loaded Greek Salad
Thursday – Venison with 3 Bean Salad,
Friday – Seared Scallops with Tuscan Beans
This is a meal plan based on the real recipes that I cook at home every week. Amidst the hectic week this week we are now counting down the days until Christmas, which is next week. Again this week we are all about keeping it clean, healthy and super easy.
Monday – Parchment Tilapia with Roasted Squash
Tuesday – One Pan Stroganoff (Except we will use venison) & Salad
Wednesday – Crockpot Asian Beef with rice & salad
Thursday – One Pan Autumn Chicken Dinner
Friday – Burrito Bowls