Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...
Post a Comment
Read more