Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating twenty-eight dollars worth of food. I have four days to go. I hope I do not die! 

At last, a change! Down 0.5kg from yesterday!

68.3kg (3.86 pounds) means that I’ve (at last) dropped below 68.8kg, but my lowest weight so far is still Day 18. 

This means that the total weight lost so far is exactly 5kg.

I was talking on the phone to my father today, and he pointed out that I wasn’t going to run out of rice in the next few days, so I might as well cook myself huge servings each day. As well as giving me extra calories, this would help embiggen my stomach for the glorious non-stop feast that will be next month.

So today, I had about twice as much rice as I’ve had any other day so far. I ate a lot of rice.

This was a good day to decide to go crazy with the rice, because as well as being out of bread, I went to cook up some potatoes and onions, to discover that the potatoes were looking distinctly unhealthy-looking and the onions have gone a bit more squishy than I’m comfortable with: 

Nine potatoes, three large onions.

I originally paid $0.92 for the potatoes and $0.87 for the onions. I’ve decided to “get my money back” on the ones that I haven’t eaten; to be on the safe side, I’ve underestimated the value of both. I’m giving myself 40 cents back for the potatoes (I have exactly half left) and 30 cents for the onions. This brings my total money spent down to $23.76. I’ve made a handy-dandy graph, showing exactly where my money went over the month: 

I had completely forgotten about the tomato soup until I made this graph. It's still sitting in my fridge, mostly uneaten.

Tomorrow I plan to go shopping with my remaining $4.24. I have four days left, and more than four dollars to spend! That’s good budgetting!

I won’t be claiming any of the rice back, or the uneaten tomato soup, because they’ve been opened. The onions and potatoes are discrete objects that I haven’t eaten, not something that I started to eat but haven’t finished yet.

From the comments:

“RIUM+” asks:

Did you take into account the weight of the camera on the days you weighed yourself without the camera?

I did! I worked out, through extensive research, that the camera makes a difference of anywhere between 0.4 and 0.5kg to my weight. I added 0.4kg to each of the weights that I recorded while I didn’t have a camera, so that the experiment would remain consistent.

“Natalie” has a suggestion:

Did you ever consider purchasing cereal with your $28, for use throughout the month?

Woolworths (your preferred supermarket I see) sell several jumbo packs of the Uncle Toby’s Plus varieties. I know because I buy them regularly. One is a 1.2kg version, full of wholegrains, museli, and a bit of dried fruit. The boxes are really good value too – about $8.

My point is, a 1.2kg box of cereal would provide you with 24 breakfasts, providing you stick to a 50g serve (which is what’s normally recommended anyway). That’s virtually your whole month covered. I know you’re some sort of weird sleeping person, but you don’t have to have cereal for breakfast only.

I realise there’s milk as well, but you could have bought a packet of dried milk for about $2, and you could have made up your own with water. So for around $10, you could have one guaranteed cereal meal per day (almost).

My reasoning is that cereal generally has lower GI levels (wholegrain ones particularly). That means it gives you energy for longer, and in a more even way, so you don’t get the spikes. White rice is all very good, but it does have a higher GI. You could have had cereal for breakfast and rice for dinner and lived (I believe) a slightly more satisfied existence for the past few weeks.

And before you say anything, no, I do not wish to conduct my own experiment where I eat nothing but cereal and rice for a month.

No, I didn’t really consider it, for a number of reasons:

Firstly, when I started this, I decided to make rice my number one priority. Literally billions of people around the world eat rice every day. A large percentage of the world live on rice and not much else. My Dad thinks that most spices and flavourings were discovered or invented because rice tastes so damned dull. Rice is the source of most of my calories, even on days where I’m eating 8 slices of bread. Today I ate nothing but rice, and while my brain still isn’t functioning at its best, it’s pretty close.

My 5kg of rice cost me $10. Had I bought oats, that’s another $8. I didn’t want to spend $18 (more than half of my total money for the month) on the first day. I wanted to leave myself some options. It would have been a choice between 5kg of rice, or 1.2kg of cereal, and I’m going to choose rice over cereal every time.

(rice, for example, is extremely portable. I can cook up some rice, chuck it in a plastic container, and eat it later in the day. To do the same thing with cereal, I would have had to either eaten it dry, or made up the milk on the other end, which isn’t always possible. Also, $10 got me 0.18kg of rice each day, as opposed to the 0.04kg of cereal I would have had each day.)

Secondly, I’ve not seen these packets of dried milk for $2. The cheapest we could find any was $6, and even then we couldn’t be sure that the milk would last me the whole month. Had I been able to find $2 dried milk, I would have bought that, 100 tea-bags for 99 cents, and a packet of sugar, and had tea for the month. I passed on a number of different food choices, simply because I couldn’t find cheap milk.

I encourage any Brisbanites to find this $2 milk that everyone tells me about, take a photo and send it in. I’ve no idea where it comes from, but I still haven’t seen any milk cheaper than $2.69 for 3 litres. (non-dehydrated; it would last 5 or 6 days at the very most.)

Thirdly, I didn’t actually know about GI levels when I started the experiment. I have learned a lot about nutrition just from emails that people (mostly Em) have sent me. If I were to do the experiment again (which I never, ever will) I would probably do it quite differently.

But fourthly, and most importantly, I would have gone absolutely mad eating the same stuff every day. Sure, it might have been better for my health, but the main obstacle I faced doing this challenge was utter, utter boredom. If I didn’t love bread and butter as much as I do (too much, some claim) then I really don’t think I would have gotten past about day 12.

My body may have been more satisfied, but my mind would have lost the plot half-way through.

Rice by itself is enough to drive any man insane. Dehydrated milk and cereal probably wouldn’t have created enough of a variety – I would have been craving bread, or any other food, and with only $8 left, I wouldn’t have been able to take any risks. (ie the potatoes, onions, sardines or pasta that I bought at various points in the month.)

I suggest, Natalie, that you do your own experiment, where you…oh. Never mind.

Seriously though, I expect that if anyone ever did take me up on my offer, and do this experiment for a month, no matter how carefully they worked out their diet, they’d quickly discover that eating the same thing every day drives you absolutely bonkers. My technique, while not the healthiest, has at least kept me sane long enough to finish the experiment.

Had I set a rule at the beginning of the month “Milk doesn’t count”, I would almost definitely have bought oats and cereals and all kinds of other interesting (and healthy) foods. I could have had a mug of tea every day, and made rice pudding every evening. It would have been a much more pleasant month, but “having a pleasant month” wasn’t the aim, and so milk was off the menu. As a result, it’s been much more interesting than a pleasant month would have been.

If you have any other questions or suggestions, please leave a comment or email me and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Tomorrow: Shopping, possibly for the last time!

(total money spent so far – $23.76. Remainder – $4.24)