Food Challenge Update – 1 week later
It’s been a full seven days since we started the ‘Waste Less Food” challenge. It’s been fun, delicious, enlightening, and literally lightening, as well. I’ve lost a few pounds, ten of them actually. Good riddance, I say! While I did expect to lose a little weight (remember: no eating out, almost no grocery buying–which means no new junk food!), I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly and don’t expect that pace to continue. I’m sure a good amount of it is water weight from the change in diet. I cook with very little salt, which can’t be said for restaurants or processed foods.
How closely have we kept to the challenge after one week?
Waste. Very little food has gone in the trash since this challenge began. I may have missed something, but this is what I remember throwing away:
- 3-4 pieces of deli turkey, leftover from family staying with us.
- 1/2 large container of plain yogurt. I bought this at one of our local health food stores. I love to support them, but they don’t have enough traffic to keep their stock fresh and the refrigeration is a bit sketchy. I’ll stick to the non-perishables from here on out.
- doggie bag of leftovers from our fave local Mexican restaurant, ordered Friday before the challenge began.
- ~1.5 pieces of homemade cornbread. I need to buy a smaller cast iron pan. It’s hard to make it through cornbread made in the one I have now.
- Karela Curry.
I think that’s it! I didn’t record a typical week before starting this, but let me tell you, this is far from typical. I’m actually thrilled with these results on waste.
Grocery Buying. We’ve been very, very good here. We did make an exception so I could cook some comfort food for friends (also in the Karela post), and we did enjoy some of this as well. I can’t cook small, and I don’t think they could have finished it off, which would have been wasting food. Other than that exception, we’ve only purchased skim milk, bread, and eggs, as outlined by the challenge. We’ll head off to the store to restock those today. Honestly, when I did go to the store, it felt a bit wrong. I wanted in and out as quickly as possible, because I want to see this through.
Eating out. Prior to this challenge, we ate at restaurants several times a week and ate restaurant leftovers several more times. I typically picked up breakfast on my way to work, and it was never healthy. It wasn’t donuts, but it was bad. I did cook before, but we kept making excuses not to cook at home. We’re busy. The kitchen is a mess (fairly relevant, as we’re doing a kitchen renovation!). We have other things we need to do. I just don’t feel like it. These excuses just didn’t work this week. We kept to the plan. I will admit one exception. I did have lunch out with a friend yesterday. She needed to get out of the house and to chat. However, I did not start this challenge to ignore my friends (especially those in need), so I’m not beating myself up about this one little bit.
Looking Forward. I think it’s going quite well, but I do have some concerns as we progress on this challenge. Other than a few pieces of fruit, we no longer have any fresh produce. While we do have some canned and frozen vegetables, I’m not sure how long these will last. We may run out of some basic ingredients before the bulk of the food is gone. I’m concerned about cooking oil, flour, and corn meal in particular. It’s really about proportions of my food stores. I’m a little nervous about how that will work out. We’ll have to see, though. I still don’t know what all is in my freezer. Maybe I should do an inventory like my friends Terry & Kia are doing. You see, they jumped on my little bandwagon here.
