December 2017 Food Report

Groceries: $92.77
Unnecessary Outside Food and Snacks: $80.12

Total Spent in December: $172.89

Bacon and eggs on toasted onion bagels with roasted potatoes and onions. That red liquid in the bagel hole is hot sauce, not blood.

     This should be a short post. As the picture above displays, I’ve mostly gone back to my homemade cooking. And even if I didn’t have that picture, the fact that my total amount spent on food was less than $200 is a dead giveaway. It felt good to finally get things back to normal, but now the cold weather is here. When it comes to food, the winter has three effects:

• Sometimes when I leave work, I’m very hungry. So the temptation is there to go to a drive thru to pick up some food. The solution for this is to obviously eat before I leave the house, which brings us to Effect #2

• When it’s under 20 degrees, it gets cold in the basement apartment. I like to be butt naked all the time in my apartment, so the chances of me getting out of my soft warm bed to cook food in a cold ass kitchen is just not happening. Last night, for example, the weather was -2 degrees. This morning was 0 degrees, with a "high" of 2. Knowing that I had a shitload of shoveling to do just to get to my car, there was NO WAY I would cook in that cold basement. So I stayed in my warm bed for as long as I could, and then ordered a large pepperoni pie from Papa John's after a hot shower. I had it delivered to work and that was that. This is the trap that I face during most winters and, unfortunately, I have yet to come up with a solution. Maybe when I have an actual apartment where I control the heat and a real kitchen, things will change.

• The third effect is actually a good one, and it also happens when I'm at home. Whenever the road is slippery due to ice or snow, I don’t like driving. I especially don’t like driving now that my tires are almost bald and I’m too cheap to pay $750 for new ones. When given the option to slide around the streets, risking death to go to a drive thru versus staying inside to eat at home, I’d much rather stay home. Of the three effects, this is the one I’m hopeful will get me through the winter without gaining too much weight.

     I still haven’t gone to the gym, but I’ve been doing squats and ab exercises at home on a surprisingly regular basis. My patented ab workout has given me the best results, so I’ll describe what I call the 20-20-10 Ab workout. While I’m in bed, I do 20 double leg raises, followed by 20 seconds of air bike, and finally followed by 10 leg scissors with 4-second intervals between each scissor pose. The key is to do all three without resting my legs, so they can’t hit the ground until the 10th scissor. And I get that “my-abs-hurt-so-much-I-can’t-fucking-breath” feeling, which is always good. When I need a greater challenge, I turn it into “30-20-10”, “30-30-10”, or the dreaded “30-30-30” (which I’ve only done once when I felt REALLY confident… and I suffered for it). Three sets in a day (2 minute intervals between sets), three times a week, and my abs are quickly getting back to stud form. The best thing about this workout is that I get to stay in bed, which is my favorite place in the winter.

     January is mostly about controlling my food expenditures. Every winter I end up spending around $400 a month on mostly outside food, so I’d like to get through each of these cold months spending a maximum of $250 total. And now that I’m getting into a regular routine of squats and ab workouts, I’d like to start pumping those dumbbells I bought months ago to work out my upper body. I’m also gonna go to the gym, but I feel it’s more important to establish a home workout first… especially since there will be many snow days that would make me stay inside. After a horrible November, December was a step in the right direction. January should be the next step forward…