Purchasing power, weight, and other fun stuff...

Purchasing Power and Real Budgeting

An interesting dynamic to this challenge is that it's only a week. To clarify: you would have a lot more purchasing power if you had the full month's amount. For example, the Goobers PB&J (PB and jelly in the same jar) was significantly less money than buying the cheapest PB and jelly separately. I want to say it was around $2.47 with the cheapest PB being the SF, at 2.00 even and the cheapest jelly being 1.50ish. Don't get me wrong, the separate versions kill it in unit pricing, but it doesn't matter if you can't work it in to your budget. This was a real eye-opener for budgeting for me. It's one thing to plan a budget but to actually execute it, is a totally different thing (talking personal life). For example, if you budget for 100 bucks/week at the grocery store and you spend $101, many of us, myself included, would think we were successful. In reality, we failed. Shopping with an inflexible amount of money really drives this point home.

Here's something else to think about: let's say you have the full month's worth of "stamps", you've planned it down the last item, your coupons are clipped, your gameface is on, and you're ready to get the absolute most amount of nutrition for your money....but....how are you going to carry it all? We'll cut you some slack and say you're having a good day and aren't fatigued from meds or chemo but you do still have to ride a bus because who can afford a car or afford repairs on a car or maybe even the fuel, or maybe even the insurance, when you can't work or can only work PT? Imagine you have 3 transfers, it's freezing or sweltering outside, and you're trying to lug a MONTH's worth of groceries home!!!!!! The "wasteful" spending at the local convenience store is starting to make more sense.

Weight

Yesterday I had 1/2 cup of oatmeal and 1 liter of water for breakfast, 2 PB&J sandwiches (4 T of pb and ~2 T of jelly: total for both sandwiches) and 1 light yogurt for lunch, with more water, a an apple for my pre-workout snack, 2 cups of tuna salad, 1 can of mustard greens, and an apple and 2 more liters of water for dinner. I was a little hungry but not bad, however the interesting thing is that I weighed in at 198# today on my office scale. I was 200# on the same scale on Monday. The only exercise I've done since Monday, at least planned exercise, is last night's grip workout. It consisted of 200 reps on the speedbag for warm-up and some light rotator cuff prehab work with bands, 5-6 max attempts on hand grippers, 3-4 sets of powersetting handgrippers, 2 hand pinch deadlift for 8 sets of 1-5 reps, 2 sets of sledge levers, 2 sets to failure on Rolling Thunder deadlift, and one set to failure on flat finger chins. It was hardly a calorie burner and I don't think there is a METs level out there to figure it but I took about 2 hours to do it so I'd be shocked if my heart rate ever got much over 70-80 bpm. I need to be 198# for the AW Tournament on Saturday and I consistently hear/read about food insecurity leading to/being a risk factor for obesity. I will be monitoring myself closely but I can tell that I'm already inclined to eat bigger portion sizes due to the uncertainty of how the week will pan out.