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The Cheapest Time of the Year


The stretch between Halloween and New Year's is one of the best but also the toughest times of the year for the cheapo. Between Christmas parties, Christmas party leftovers and people dumping off candy and sweets in the kitchen areas at work, it's extremely difficult to keep off pounds when you're constantly bombarded with free food. I cannot recall the last time I spent any money on food at work that weren't snacks that I keep in my desk to stretch out over time. I've been saving a lot of money, but it's only because I've been walking through a free calorie minefield every day.

Throughout most of the year, approaching your food spending budget with the mindset of a homeless person will translate into easy and dramatic weight loss, but the cheapo diet isn't meant to withstand this kind of free food bonanza. Not only is all this free food keeping me from buying lunch at work, it's cutting down on my grocery bills! Sure, there's some fruit there, but a cheap man cannot live on fruit alone, especially when pasta with meat sauce in the offering.

I won't be adding any graphs to this post because they're not very pretty as of late. The 5 pounds I dropped right before my trip to Italy I gave right back to the calorie gods in the blink of an eye.

Also complicating matters is the fact that I haven't been able to keep my steps over 20,000 every day to counterbalance some of these gastronomical excesses. We've got a baby on the way in March, and it's been a non-stop sprint every night (unfortunately only in the figurative sense) to get the house in order so my afternoon dog walks have been kind of short in the interest of time.

The only good news is that all the work is keeping me out of the kitchen every night, and even doing busy work around the house will burn off some calories but not enough to translate into weight loss. I guess I should be happy that I've been holding the line at 167. I know for sure that I've breached the 170 mark a few times during this onslaught, but I've been too chicken to step on the scale those days to face reality.

I've also been slipping in the food logging department because what I've been eating as been kind of all over the place. I'm still eating my power breakfast every morning, so at least the good ship cheapo hasn't totally capsized.

My plan is to power through my remaining house prep tasks for the baby, hopefully wrap them by the end of this weekend and return to my normal routine on Monday. I don't expect any let up in the free food department, but at least I can offset them a little more on the step counter until the New Year.


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