Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I spent exactly twenty-seven dollars and ninety-three cents on food. I did not die.

A graph showing exactly how I spent every dollar.

 Here’s today’s Daily Cheesecake – I’ve included the first photos taken (way back on Day 2) for contrast. You can see quite a marked difference:

Notice also hair and beard growth...if you can stop looking at my stomach in that bottom photo for long enough.

Today I woke up at half-past noon. On the plus side, I got a lovely long sleep, but it also meant that I only had half an hour to get to impro classes. I quickly weighed myself and took the daily cheesecake, put my chocolate biscuits in my bag of bread, and ran out the door.

I got to class, and joined in with the activities, still yet to have anything to eat. The man running the class knew about my experiment, and was alternately lovely and very cruel about it: we were doing an activity where we had to pretend we were walking on the beach. I happen to hate the feel of sand under my feet, and so I was grimacing and holding my head, imagining the noise that sand makes when it rubs together. He came over and checked to make sure that I was okay, which I thought was rather nice.

The next few activities we did were all about pretending to eat food.

“Imagine,” he said, grinning at me, “the texture, the taste, the smell. Picture the food as it slides down your throat…”

About an hour later, we were miming a game of tug-of-war. I get extremely involved in mimes, so I started panting and sweating and going a bit red – I “lost” the tug-of-war, fell over, and tried to get up again straight away.

I got as close to passing out as I have all month. The room started throbbing, I couldn’t see anything, and I’m not sure how long I actually sat there, clutching my head. The next thing I remembered was the instructor coming over, and asking if I was okay.

I sat out of the next few games.

During the break, I went to eat my bread, and discovered it was full of ants. I picked the ants off of two slices, used up the rest of my butter, and had a stale chocolate biscuit for dessert. I still have two pieces of bread left, but I’m not gonig to eat them. They’re a bit stale, and I don’t really want to fight the ants for them. I have also finished off my chocolate biscuits.

On the way home, we went to the shops. I was determined to spend my last 57 cents, or as close to as I could – to my surprise (and dismay) none of the chocolate there was less than 70 cents. The only thing affordable from the confectionary aisle was lollipops, and I don’t much care for lollipops.

In the fruit section, they had limes for 50 cents (limes must be much more in demand than they were 3 weeks ago) but a lime isn’t exactly my idea of a tasty treat. I asked one of the service guys what he would recommend, and he showed me that they had kiwi fruit on sale for 50 cents as well.

I had forgotten how much eating kiwi fruit stings the tongue.

I came home, and remembered that I had one piece of devon left. When I was young, another of my favourite treats was fried devon, so I turned on the electric frypan, and cooked a piece up:

I got impatient while the frypan was heating up, and nibbled around the edges.

It was quite nice. Slightly better than un-fried devon, but not as good on a sandwich.

It’s almost 8pm, and (except for rice and a tiny bit of soy sauce) I’m completely out of food that I can eat. In four hours time, I’ll be chowing down on (in this order) a Snickers bar, Bavarian Apple Crepes, a cup of tea, and a steak.

It will be a good time. You should come too.

From the comments:

Several people wrote in to explain the (really simple and obvious now that I’m a bit more clear-headed) explanation of the rice’s calorie listing:

“goddess_amy”, over at the livejournal feed:

Rice swells when it’s cooked so 1/2C of dry rice magically becomes over 1C of cooked rice. I don’t know about rice cookers, but with cooking rice on the stove, you put rice + water in and get out just cooked rice. The water has to go somewhere! 

Water doesn’t have any calories, so the amount of calories in 1/2C has decreased. Or to put it another way, the 1/2C cooked rice is measured after it’s cooked. 

Also your sis is totally wrong on bread. It’s disgusting to eat plain, but plain toast is actually quite pleasent. I almost prefer dry toast to toast with butter.

“Dan Beeston”:

You mutton-head. It’s saying if you take half a cup of raw rice and cook it. The resulting meal has 355 calories (or galleries as you’ve written somewhere above). But it also expands. It’ll be, like, two cups worth of cooked rice. If you then take half a cup of that cooked rice. It’ll be mostly water and thus only 105 calories.

Friend-of-the-blog Em:

It’s your fuzzy brain, you twit…
More dry rice fits in a half-cup than cooked rice!
You have a LOT MORE big, squishy, moist rice grains when it’s cooked!

In my defense…no, I’ve got nothing. It’s really pretty obvious. Who eats raw rice, anyway?

“Michael Griffin” hasn’t read the rules.

$28 covers every solid and liquid that enters your mouth for a month. Have you made allowance for the cost of water? Don’t know if you pay for it or your landlord (though that wouldn’t matter I don’t think), and how much a person drinks in a month, though.

I decided before I started this that water would be free. I kept track of exactly how much water I had each day for the first week or so, but got a bit sick of it. My housemate Cannibal Kate thinks that alcoholic beverages shouldn’t have counted either. There is no logic behind that suggestion.

If I was out and about without water, I would go and buy a bottle without counting that as part of the money. I didn’t want to risk dehydration – we get a lot of our liquids from the foods we eat. Eating much less food, I needed to drink a lot more water.

“Em” likes my beard:

By the way, I reckon you need to check how much the beard has added to your weight… do a penultimate weigh-in, then shave it, and weigh again!
Another reason your skin may have cleared up = less shaving/soap

I love the idea of weighing the beard, except that I’m planning on doing a final weigh-in about a minute or two before midnight, outside the pancake manor. After that, I am not going to be shaving. I am going to be eating. (which will obviously affect my weight.)

Still Em:

You are looking very naturally-Amish…

Amish Beards!

Gay Beards!

Until I saw heaps of them one after another, I never consciously noticed that Amish men shave the face part of their face, but still have huge beards. That’s why it’s such a distinctive look.

The Amish page for Wikipedia tells me that ”Moustaches are forbidden, because they are associated with European military officers and militarism in general.” It doesn’t explain why they shave below the mouth though. Anyone have insider Amish knowledge?

How I feel:

At the moment, my tongue is still reeling from that kiwi fruit. My brain is distinctly un-wooly – fuzziness of the brain is a feeling I’ll be happy to see go.

I’m not particularly hungry at the moment, but I’m still looking forward to some delicious foods in a few hours. Especially tea. I have really missed tea this month.

More than anything, I’m feeling glad that is going to be finished very soon, and a little bit proud that I accomplished it. It’s not something that I’ll ever, ever do again…but it’s something that I’ll always be glad that I did. I discovered a lot of interesting facts throughout the month, discovered how vital food really is to the brain, and really tested my will-power.

I spent $27.93 on food this month. It’s a strange sort of accomplishment, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless.

I spent $27.93 on  food this month. Tonight, I will be spending more than that on food in less than an hour.

Misc:

• I forgot to mention this in other posts (or I’ve forgotten if I did) but from time to time this month, to conserve energy, I would catch a taxi. The experiment wasn’t “Only spend twenty-eight dollars for a month”, it was specifically about spending money on food. All in all, I’d say I spent about $30-40 on taxis in the month – I only caught them if it was particularly hot, or if I had to walk a particularly long way, but it’s an expense that I wouldn’t have normally had.
• I’ve found myself short of knives all month. Not forks or spoons, just knives. Most of the food I’ve had this month I’ve been able to eat with my hands, but you can’t butter bread without a knife. I own a number of tiny plates that I don’t normally use (you can see one holding the devon in the above photo) – I’ve used them more this month than I have in the last two years.They’re convenient for all types of tiny food. Normally I’d be using big bowls and plates, but I haven’t been eating any meals that have required them.
• One day, while I was buttering my bread, I accidentally picked up and used a knife that Cannibal Kate had been buttering cupcakes with. I didn’t notice until I was eating the bread, and I tasted something quite sweet. It wasn’t really big enough to mention, but if it really bothers you, pretend that I paid 7 cents for it, and call it even.

And now, the picture that you’ve all been waiting for…

Daily weight:

66.8kg. That's 0.9kg less than yesterday.

Perhaps because I haven’t eaten rice for two days now, perhaps because my body has an acute sense of drama…for whatever reason, I lost almost an entire kilo since yesterday, meaning that I’ve lost a total of 6.5kg this month.

Remembering that the camera weighs between 0.4 and 0.5kg, this puts my weight at around 66.3, maybe 66.4kg. (146 pounds)

I stand 188cm tall, so my BMI is now 18.8 – still (barely) in the “Normal weight” range.

As I mentioned, I’m going to weigh myself tonight outside the pancake manor. I’ll also do a follow-up post in a month or two, which will include how much I weigh after a month of eating properly.

Here’s the final “Daily weight” graph:

I lost, on average, 0.24kg/day. The red line shows what my weights would have been had I lost that much each and every day.

Tonight is the “End of 28 Days, 28 Dollars Celebration”. A lot of big names (on this blog, anyway) will be there – Cannibal Kate, my cousin Gavin, friend-of-the-blog Em, RIUM+, and the star of next month’s project, Sarah Morgan.

You should come too! Pancake Manor, 11:30pm tonight, I’ll be the one carrying a penguin, dressed in a far-too-loud Hawaiian shirt. There’s a Facebook event and everything!

Hope to see you there!

-Peter C. Hayward

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