Why Is It So Much Cheaper to Be Skinny?

Down to 128.8 this morning: hot dang. Exactly on target.

We’re now at the end of January. I hit the 130-pound diet goal on September 26. Since then it’s been too cold to swim and I’ve been too busy to walk every single day (though usually do get some sort of activity in most days). But I’ve managed to stay right around 130 pounds, give or take a pound or two.

I haven’t run a Quickbooks report to prove it, but it’s my belief that I’m spending a LOT less on groceries, despite the mountains of fresh veggies and fruits and the “less meat but BETTER meat” strategy. I’ve spent about $250 on groceries this month — a far cry from the typical $350 to $400 of a year ago.

Why? In theory, it should cost more to eat nothing but whole foods. Are we not told that poor folks consume all that junk food because it’s cheaper, on the surface, to buy processed junk and fast-food? Is it not true that corn is subsidized and healthier vegetables are not? Do we not believe that grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, wild-caught fish, and humanely raised pork are astronomically expensive?

The key, I think, is that when you’re not thinking ahead about what you’re going to eat, you’ll buy anything that comes to hand. Also, when you’re not thinking about cuisine, you tend to eat more at any given time.  When you have a diet strategy in mind, you’re a lot more careful about what you buy, and of course you eat less per sitting.

Now that I’m in the habit of eating smaller portions, the loot hauled in the door from a grocery trip lasts a lot longer. A single stir-fry, for example, provides two or three meals instead of one or two meals. Before, I would scarf the whole delicious thing down and so would have to cook, say, seven separate dinners for a week instead of five or six.

Also, with what we might call “mindful dining,” one is much less inclined to the impulse buy. Before, if I was hungry and in the vicinity of a better AJ’s or a Whole Foods, I would run in and grab a large box of sushi (maybe two!) and, naturally, a beer. Or more likely, a four-pack or six-pack of dark, foamy, delicious stout. And by golly, look at that: real Stilton! And what’s this “white” tea? And ohhhhhh I do love those spectacular barbecued baby back ribs. You can’t have those without a giant twiced-baked potato slathered in cheddar cheese…

“Ma’am? May I rent that llama over there to haul this stuff out to the car?”

And speaking of foamy-delicious beer, although I haven’t quit swilling a potable once a day, my choice of alcoholic beverage has changed enormously.

Quit drinking beer pretty much altogether, except as a special treat: too calorific.

Wine proved to be highly problematic: I dearly love wine and will drink it like soda pop. And it’s too damn easy to pour like soda pop. You finish a glass of wine halfway through your meal, so what do you do? Tip the bottle into the glass to add “just a little more” to come out even. And then just a little more. And then just a little… Uh huh. By the time you’ve finished your diet feast, you’ve consumed half a bottle of $10 red. This not only was too calorific, it was too much to drink and too expensive: at $8 to $12 a bottle plus exorbitant taxes, if you’re buying two bottles of wine a week you’re ponying up around $80 a month — and that doesn’t include the beer you’re buying to go with the sushi and the barbecued ribs!

So the wine imbibulation had to go.

Interestingly, certain breeds of hard liquor contain significantly fewer calories per dose than does a glass of wine. And because I’m not averse to watering my booze down, I can make a shot of whiskey or gin go a lot further than a beer or a glass of wine will go. A single bottle of very good bourbon from Costco will last well upwards of a month, at half the price of eight $10 bottles of middling wine.

Hard liquor has as its advantage that you have to get up and mix another drink if you want another. This activity — get ice, get the bottle out of the cupboard, retrieve the jigger from the dishwasher, get cold water from the fridge — is enough to remind you that it’s time to stop, whereas “just a few drops” more wine encourages you to keep pouring.

In the booze + food department, one thing that soon became apparent is that once you hit your target weight, you can keep it down more effectively by eating larger meals earlier in the day and smaller meals or even just healthy snacks at dinner time. I like a drink with dinner. So, I wait to have a large, glorious mid-day meal until I’ve finished whatever running around needs to be done and know I don’t have to drive any more that day. Because this is likely to be around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, it means I have to eat a good breakfast that will last until after the noon hour.

This eating pattern, by sheer coincidence, turns out to be an effective weight-loss and blood-glucose management strategy! That’s nice. It also means, though, that if I’ve had a bourbon and water or a gin rickey at 2:00 p.m., I am not going to go back out to the grocery store in the afternoon. By two or three, I’m done with running around spending money.

So, in a lot of subtle ways that have nothing to do with personal finance, the diet plan also works to promote frugality.

Image: Nejmlez. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.