$2 a day: week two recap

Week two is now complete and this is day fifteen of the experiment. I still feel really good, and have quite a few things to talk about. This morning I woke up to a phone call from my cousin Mark who lives around 80 miles away, he asked me if I’d meet him for lunch since he was going to be in town so I met him around 11:45 am at Taco Johns. He picked up a super potato ole for me and I took it, but as I stated in the experiment I will go ahead and include this as if I bought it myself. I thought it was very reasonable and I don’t feel bad about it whatsoever but it does mean a few things.

So here’s where I stand from a money standpoint. I have three receipts, one for $42.60, the second for $5.10, and the third for $3.30. The super potato ole came to $4.50 after tax, putting my running total up to $55.50. This does mean I will go slightly over for the experiment from the perspective of allotting myself $60 for the entire month. I plan on buying a minimum of 2 more loaves of bread and 1 dozen eggs. I may buy up to 3 more loaves of bread, the 1 dozen eggs, and have contemplated adding a second can of cream of mushroom soup and/or buying some brown sugar for the oatmeal. Also, I must note that the bread went from $1.32 to $1.38, which is very disappointing. If I made my “minimum” purchase, after tax I’d be looking at $60.24, and if I made my maximum purchase, after tax I’d be looking at about $64.23 (I’m guessing brown sugar is around $1.30). Obviously I woulda been plenty fine without my Taco Johns today, but considering the circumstances I’m okay with the purchase.

Another note about the Taco Johns meal today is I cannot believe how full I was went I was done eating it. I was stuffed. My stomach has really shrunk something fierce, and I’m happy about it. It’ll be interesting how I modify my diet for next month, as I’m sure I’ll make updates about what I plan to do.

Now, more to note about how things are on my end. Overall I’m not always getting in the six meals a day, thats why I’m not sure if I’ll need the 6^th loaf of bread. I’d say for the month I’ll average a solid 5 meals a day. Also, at the end of the experiment I intend to look through everything and plug it in to the spread sheet as far as how much I guess I have left. I’ll note if I have 1/3 of the mayonnaise left, how many oats are left, etc, to get a real feel for about how many calories I consumed each day with my food. From this I will also get a good feel to calculate how much I spent on food and whatnot by way of the unit price.

I weighed in today at 265 flat, which is good. I lost 2.5 pounds in week two, if I keep going at a rate like this I will be very content. That would put me on pace for a lost of 20-21 pounds for the month, something I can be proud about. I think overall my target weight for myself would ideally be in the 230 pound range, and I am coming up with ideas of what I want to continue to do to eventually reach this goal.

I feel like everything is going well and I’m not as disappointed overall in how things are going as much so as I was earlier this week after some wastes of meals/etc. I am opening the second bag of bagels tomorrow which I am stoked for. The only thing to really complain about is how the price of the foods I am purchasing has fluctuated and how I’ve gotten in on most of the worst prices. I would of saved $0.60 on my tuna purchase merely a few days after I bought my groceries, and now the bread raised $0.06 a loaf, which will amount to $0.18 or $0.24, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot but when my target meal price is around the $0.20 range it’s definitely relatively a setback.

I’ll post in the next few days some of my ideas that I am toying with as far as what to do next. Half way done!