November 2015 Food Report

Groceries: $164.41
Unnecessary Outside Foods and Snacks: $122.88

Total Spent for November 2015: $287.29

Probably the healthiest thing I ate all of November. Roasted veggies with King salmon and fresh SALSA

Ugh. I really messed up in November. My long streak of keeping my food budget under $200 was officially broken. And, strangely enough, it all started with organic chips.

Evil chips

For the past couple of months, I made my usual rice and chicken for the weekend shifts at the shipping depot. I wouldn’t bring anything else because I knew that 2.5 pounds of food is more than enough to handle a 12 hour shift, thanks to a post I wrote in August. Bringing more food would be overkill and was the real reason why I’d gain weight on the weekends. The first weekend of November I decided to bring some organic chips “just in case”. After I ate the chips I felt this hunger in me, and I had a massive craving for pepperoni pizza. So I ordered a medium pie and ate it then and there. Same thing happened the next weekend. And then it just spiraled into chaos.

Tasted as good as it looked. I underestimated my love of pepperoni pizza. Stronger than M&Ms. Stronger than burgers. Almost as strong as my love of bread

I hadn't been to Dunkin Donuts in months. In November, I went there at least 3 times for doughnuts and bagels with cream cheese

Bagels with cream cheese. Donuts. Egg sandwiches from the diner. And more pepperoni pizza. The avalanche of eating outside foods didn’t end until the last day of November, when I had 3 bagels with cream cheese, 5 donuts, and some kind of meat sandwich (can’t remember what kind). It was awful. I spent over $120 on unnecessary outside foods, an act that had another consequence other than misused money. Because I was eating outside foods, I had ignored the groceries I had bought at the beginning of the month. I had to throw about 25% of November’s groceries in the garbage at the end of the month. That felt even worse.

You know, I attack my eating habits in two stages. The first stage is to get used to making food at home. The second stage is to make healthy foods at home. Making foods at home is extremely important because I control the ingredients and it’s automatically better for me. It doesn’t matter if I make unhealthy foods like cream cheese bagels or beef tacos. As long as my nourishment comes from homemade food, I get closer to completing the first stage and move on to the second. So does this mean that it would be okay to eat a pepperoni pizza as long as I make it myself? For stage 1, absolutely!

Black Bean burger.

I tried a couple of new foods and they sucked. The first was “Sugar in the Raw”, which I was gonna use on my Cheerios instead of cinnamon. I had no idea that the sugar was so crystallized that it sinks to the bottom of the cereal and stays there. Nino said that raw sugar has to be grinded in order to be used for regular stuff, so that was a waste of money. The next item was my first vegan purchase, Chipolte Black Been Burgers. A lady at Costco gave me a small sample and I loved it, so I decided to buy. Unfortunately, the only way to enjoy a black bean burger is to have a small bite. The more you eat it, the more you taste the beans. They really tried hard to make it taste like a burger, but it’s not even close. Despite this, I want to continue trying at least one vegan/vegetarian dish a month.

December has already started and I seemed to have learned my lesson. I only bring my prepared food to work with me, no chips or snacks. I haven’t developed the willpower to resist gorging and using it as a gateway to eat outside foods. I’ll get there eventually, of course. It just takes time to break the habit, as I learned with McDonald’s.

P.S.:  Sometime early next year, I'll buy a big toaster oven so I can start making pepperoni pizza. I want to make it as healthy as possible: wheat flour, organic tomato sauce and mozzarella, and finally some turkey bacon as pepperoni.