Some delicious cupcakes that my housemate Cannibal Kate made, to celebrate the end of the 28 Days, 28 Dollars project.

28 Days, 28 Dollars:

You may have noticed that the follow-up 28 Days, 28 Dollars posts haven’t gone up yet. The first week of this month has been quite busy for me – I’m catching up on projects that I couldn’t work on while I was food-deprived, editing the Celibate Sarah posts, and above all eating. God I love eating.

The last few 28 Days, 28 Dollars posts will go up in the next week or two, when I get some time to sit down and nut them out. Don’t worry, they have not been forgotten.

Impro:

In other news, I’ve been performing in some short-form improvised theatre lately, in shows run by Edge Improv and Impro Mafia. Here are two scenes from this past week – one starring myself and my cousin Gavin Core, the other starring Gavin, myself, and a local Brisbane improvisor called Joel Gilmore. Enjoy!

Two Line Vocabulary – Cairo, Egypt

Should’ve Said – Up a Tree

Celibate Sarah:

From the comments I’ve received so far, everyone is enjoying the Celibate Sarah posts. (please don’t be shy – leave questions! She is looking forward to answering all of your sex-related enquiries.)

I’ve even had a few people comment that they wish she updated more than twice a week. I was having a chat to her today, and due to uni commitments, it doesn’t look like the comic she was intending on making will be happening as soon as she hoped – as such, we have decided to increase the number of updates.

I can’t say exactly how often there will be updates, but they’ll be slightly shorter and appear more often. If enough comments are left with interesting and relevant questions, we might even be able to increase the frequency to once a day! Go, ask her everything you’ve ever wanted to know about celibacy! She’s not shy!

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

I hope I do not die!

The same weight as yesterday!

67.9kg! I haven’t lost or gained any weight since yesterday, as you can see on this convenient graph:

I suspect that by the end of next month, I will have put all of this weight back on, and considerably more.

Daily Cheesecake:

I love these boxers. They are new!

Today I ate more than my quota – tomorrow at midnight, I’m going to be chowing down on all of my favourite foods (well, two foods I quite like, anyway) and so I spoiled myself a bit today. I had 7 slices of bread, and 6 chocolate biscuits! (but only one slice of devon.) It was like all my Christmases had come at once.

I didn’t even bother cooking up rice today. With one day to go, it doesn’t seem worth it. I could quite happily never eat rice again, to be honest.

I was reading through a Calorie-counting book that friend-of-the-blog Em lent me, and for the first time, I noticed this on the rice page:

White Rice:

Raw: 1/2 cup, 100g: 355 calories
Cooked: 1/2 cup, 80g: 105 calories

I’ve been eating the rice cooked (obviously). I put in about half a cup, and then cook it…does this mean that it then turns into only 80g worth of rice, and loses two-thirds of its galleries? Do you have to re-measure the rice when it’s cooked? Or does “raw” just mean “half a cup when it’s raw, with the same calories when it’s cooked”?

Perhaps it’s my fuzzy, fuzzy brain, but I don’t understand this at all. Is anyone able to decipher this?

From the comments:

“Katydid”:

For the record, there’s a precedent of throwing up in the Pancake Manor bathrooms – my sister did it two New Year’s Eves running.

I have nothing to add to this, just thought that it was amusing enough to re-post. I really don’t think I’ll be throwing up, but if it does happen, I’ll have people with cameras on-hand to record the experience.

My sister Elizabeth (you may know her better as MeatGirl, from StinkyPete 1.0) disagrees with the way I have been distributing my butter (I only use it on bread, because toast doesn’t require it)

You have it all wrong! White bread can be eaten plain (though is delicious with butter!), toast, irrespective of type, is far too dry to be eaten plain!

She is so wrong that I had to make a video, showing the correct way of eating toast. (I actually made this last night, but I didn’t want to wait up while it uploaded.) Watch and learn:

How I feel:

I’ve been okay today. A bit hungry from time to time, and my brain’s really fuzzy at the moment…I have rewritten almost every sentence in this post three or four times. That could be because it’s 3:30am: I  went to my friend’s 21st birthday party tonight:

It was quite a lovely party, with a lot of delicious food...that I couldn't eat.

It was a cocktail party, so there was a generous array of alcohol laid out:

You can see my cousin Gavin there, behind the drinks.

I’m not really much of a drinker, but I do enjoy the occasional cocktail. Throughout the night, my friends invented all manner of delicious-sounding drinks…and of course the more they drank, the more that they forgot that I wasn’t allowed to have any. I turned down more food and drink tonight than I have for the rest of the project put together, mostly from people who already knew about the experiment.

I got a few compliments about the beard, and also several people noted that my skin had cleared up. I suspect that this is because my diet lately has been “rice” and “bread”, and very few greasy or sugary products. Weight-loss and clearer skin – maybe I should sell this experiment as a diet. It has everything you want, except…well, except food.

One more day to go! One more god-damned day.

Watching every bite of every meal I eat has become second nature to me now. I predict that it will take a few days to switch back. I’m going to be mentally keeping track of every cent that I spend on food for a while now (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) I can still quote exactly how much every piece of food I have eaten this month has cost.

Tomorrow there will be three posts:

1. Immediately after I’ve weighed myself and taken the daily cheesecake, those will go up.
2. I have impro classes in the afternoon, but after I’ve finished that, the first post of next month’s project – “Celibate Sarah” – will go up.
3. After I get home from the pancake manor, in the wee hours of the morning, I’ll try to put up a post with some of the pictures and video from that. This may have to wait until after I’ve had some sleep.

If you want to come along and celebrate the end of this project with me tomorrow night, it’s at the Pancake Manor, Brisbane City, at 11:30pm. We’ve booked a table under the name “Peter”, and you are invited to come and join us! I will be carrying a giant penguin, and wearing an extremely loud blue and green shirt.  (Facebook event.)

I still have 57 cents left over, so if I see anything food-related for less than 60 cents tomorrow, I’m definitely going to buy it.

Tomorrow: The end of the project!

(total money spent so far – $27.43. Remainder – $0.57 – enough for at least a dozen grapes!)

The project that starts next month will be related to sex. On the 28th, there will be a post introducing the project, and it will have strong sexual themes. If that’s a problem, avoid any posts tagged “Celibate Sarah”.

Hope to see you Saturday night!

Down 0.3kg from yesterday!

I was surprised to find that my weight had dropped down below 68kg today! I now weight 67.9kg (149.69 pounds) – 5.4kg less than the first weigh-in. If we estimate my starting weight at 74kg, that means that I’ve lost 7.3% of my total body-weight over the month.

Graph:

As you can see, today is the least that I have weighed all month.

I can’t imagine I’ll lose much more weight over the next two days. (two days! Only two days to go!)

For the past week or so, my first thought upon waking up and my last thought before going to bed has been “How many more days to go?” (just before/after falling to sleep are when I’m least astute, so it can take me three or four guesses before I get it. I have to count on my hands.)

I am really, really excited about getting to eat again.

What I ate today:

I’m starting to think that buying a variety of delicious food was a bad idea. I have a plate of rice that’s been sitting next to me for upwards of 10 hours, because I just can’t eat it. I’ve tried soy sauce, I’ve tried nibbling at it, but ( even though it was quite a small portion to begin with) I can’t motivate myself to finish it.

I blame the chocolate biscuits, personally. They are delicious, but further highlight how undelicious the rice is.

Last night, after going to bed, I was thinking about the various foods that I was going to have in a few days, and anything involving meat was suddenly extremely unappealing.

Since I started this, “unappealing” has not been a word that I would use to describe any food that isn’t rice or terrible tomato soup. “Unappealing” had become a word of the past. But when I visualised a pizza, it wasn’t tempting me. The thought of eating one actually made me feel very slightly ill.

It took me a while to work out why this was; I think I had far too much ham last night.

This morning, I felt much more friendly about the idea of meat, and when I couldn’t finish my rice, went and got the ham bone out of the fridge, and started chewing on the gristle.

See my beard in all its glory.

I’m a chewer. Not gum, but I like to have something around to munch on. I pulled most of that white gristle off the end, and I’ve had that rolling around my mouth for most of the day.

I also had my five chocolate biscuits, my slice of devon (on bread), two slices of buttered bread, and (as you’ll see shortly) some toast.

A photo left over from yesterday:

My remaining butter: I finished off that smaller lump this morning, to butter my bread. The larger lump only has to last me two more days!

I’m having a bit of trouble comprehending what life will be like when I can just eat whatever I want. It’s going to feel weird for a couple of days.

My friend “Em” continues to send me links about anything even vaguely food-related that she can find. I thought this one was pretty interesting:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225172639.htm

” “It is generally accepted that diet and obesity are accountable for 30 percent of preventable causes of cancer, but nobody really knows why,” Cheng said. “These findings demonstrate that an increase in lipids leads directly to a rise in cancer metastasis.”

Researchers have theorized that tumor cells need more lipids than ordinary tissues to provide energy and material for tumor growth and metastasis.

“Before this work, however, most of the evidence was anecdotal, but here we present a mechanistic study,”"

And consuming excessive amounts of polyunsaturated fats may be an even worse idea:

“The researche[r]s used the imaging and cell-counting tools to document that linoleic acid, which is predominant in polyunsaturated fats, caused increasing membrane phase separation, whereas oleic acid, found in monounsaturated fats, did not. Increased membrane phase separation could improve the opportunity of circulating tumor cells to adhere to blood vessel walls and escape to organs far from the original tumor site. The new findings support earlier evidence from other research that consuming high amounts of polyunsaturated fat may increase the risk of cancer spreading.”

It looks like I’m pretty safe from cancer! I’m not consuming excessive amounts of anything at this stage. (except possibly ham, which I have now run out of.)

I also discovered today that February is “American Heart Month”, and Health.com has celebrated with an article called 28 Days, 28 Ways to Slash Your Risk of Heart Disease. Only eating $28 worth of food is not on the list, though a couple of them are relevant to what I’m doing:

• Eating oatmeal for breakfast. (an incredibly cheap breakfast)
• Losing 5-7% of your current body weight. (thus far, I have lost a bit over 7% of my body weight at the beginning of the month.)
• Replace cheese on sandwiches with avacado. (cheese is ridiculously expensive. Other than butter, I haven’t had any dairy products since starting this experiment.)

My favourite was Monday, February 9th’s tip:

The more a juice stains, the better it is for your heart.

Dream:

I had a dream several nights ago, but forgot to blog about it until now: I was at a chocolate shop (the location of far too many of my dreams lately), stocking up for chocolate for when the project was over. The shop-owner was stressing out, because someone had brought a block of Cadbury chocolate to the counter, but then decided not to buy it.

“Please,” she was begging, “You’ve got to buy this. You’ve got to!”

My inital instinct was to say no, but then I realised how cheap it was, and added it to my pile of purchases. Somehow, even though the other chocolate was for when the month was over, the block of Cadbury had to be included in my twenty-eight dollars. It was cheap enough that it wouldn’t break the bank, so I decided to have a piece.

I put it into my mouth, and here’s the part that amazed me…I could taste it. Even though I was asleep, and clearly dreaming, I could distinctly taste the chocolate.

I woke up with the taste of chocolate still in my recent memory.

What’s up with that? I didn’t know you could taste things in dreams. But unless one of my housemates slipped some chocolate into my mouth last night, I managed to accurately imagine the taste of chocolate.

Odd.

Earlier in the dream, someone had been cooking a cream bun, and had roasted the cream nicely. I ate it, forgetting about the project, but then spat it back out immediately as soon as I remembered. This was on the night of the 22nd – more than three weeks in, and I’m still having dreams where I forget the experiment and accidentally eat something. They’re annoying more than anything, and it makes me wonder what my subconscious is trying to tell me.

(the taste of chocolate later in the dream more than made up for it.)

Body Odour:

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a few days now – my body odour has changed. Significantly. I can’t particularly describe the “before” or “after”, but I know how I smell, and it’s changed. It’s a bit unnerving…I feel less like myself. I suspect this is due to the changes in what I eat, not the changes in quantity. Does anyone know anything about how food affects your scent?

Poo news:

I don’t think I’ve gone to the toilet in a couple of days. As I’ve said before, it’s not something that I pay special attention to, but I can’t really recall the last time I went to the loo.

End of Project Party:

Just a reminder, I’m celebrating the end of this little project with a trip to the Pancake Manor, Brisbane’s 24-hour pancake restaurant, located in an old church. It’s one of my favourite places to eat, and (by chance) was where the project kicked off in the first place.

I’ll be there from about 11:30pm, dressed in this shirt, carrying this penguin – you are invited to attend! I’d love to meet some more readers; come and join us as we celebrate in true pancakey style! Here’s the Facebook event, if that helps you to organise your social calendar.

Hope to see you there!

There was going to be a toast-related video going up tonight, but it’s taking too long to upload, so I’m going to hold off until tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Daily update. Also, toast-related video!

(total money spent so far – $27.43. Remainder – $0.57 – enough for a tiny tiny elephant!)

It's been a while since we had one of these!

Cannibal Kate and I were both awake at the same time this morning, so for the first time since I got my camera back, I remembered to get the Daily Cheesecake Shot.

For comparison, here’s a photo from Day 5 (the first day that I’m not slouching in the photo.) I can’t spot much difference, but I’ve had a number of people tell me that I look skinnier:

At the time, I genuinely thought that was as much as my facial hair was going to grow.

Honestly, I think that the biggest revelation I’ve had this month is that I can grow a freaking beard. Sure, it’s a beard that only covers the bottom quarter of my face, but it’s much more facial hair than I actually thought I could grow. I was playing around on the The Hero Factory, and I discovered that they had (almost) my exact beard:

Although at first glance it might seem like I've just posted the Daily Cheesecake first, look closely. It's hard to tell, but this isn't actually a photo of me.

At the end of the month, I still plan on shaving it off.

Daily Weight!

That's down 0.1kg from yesterday, but still 0.2kg above the all-time low of Day 18.

Weight-graph:

"One of these weights is not like the others, one of these weights is not quite the same."

From the comments:

“Joel” comments:

Not absolutely convinced, though, as to whether you should’ve got your money back for your potatoes. After all, you got them cheap (I presume?) because you bought them in bulk. If you couldn’t eat them all before your time ran out, then you might’ve had to pay more for fewer (if that makes sense: more per potato, though still less money overall!)

Actually, the potatoes were sold by the weight. I could have bought 1 at 69 cents/kilo, I could have bought 100…there was no deal for buying them in bulk.

The onions came in bags already, but they too were sold by the weight, and there were bags of varying sizes. For the sake of the food-buying theory, I’m not actually “getting a refund”, I’m pretending that I bought half as many potatoes, and a smaller bag of onions.

It’s all above-board. I wouldn’t cheat on science!

Shopping:

With $4.24 remaining to spend however I please, and only 4 days of the experiment to go (including today), I thought that I would splash out a bit, treat myself a little. It’s all going to be over, so very very soon, and it seems a waste of money to buy boring foods like lentils and sweet potatoes.

If I found a chocolate bar for less than fifty cents, I was having it.

First thing I bought was the staple of my diet these days, delicious cheap white $1.09 Woolworths bread. 

$3.55 left,  I went looking for something to put on it:

Clearly I was wrong; Woolworths has two in-store brands as well. "Home Brand", and "Wow Select".

The peanut-butter tempted me. I could buy a jar of peanut-butter, and smother every slice of bread for the next four days in it. Ultimately though, I thought $2.50 was too much to spend, and peanut-butter can be quite dry. I was after something a little more moist.

Earlier this month, my housemate Cannibal Kate lost a bet, and had to spend only $5 on food for 5 days. I bet her another twenty-eight dollars that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and halfway through the second day, she dropped out, meaning that I haven’t had to pay any mony for food this month.

During her single day of cheap living, she bought some salami from the deli at Coles; two or three slices for only sixty cents.

I had a look at the meats cabinet, and the cheapest sliced meat was devon, at $4.99/kilo. I decided to spend a dollar or two on devon (apparently this is an Australian name – you may know it as “bologna sausage”) when I spotted this:

I don't know who Gern is, but for $2.95/kilo, I'm not going to ask.

They had one ham bone left, so on impulse, I asked how much it was. A few minutes later, I was the proud owner of a $1.34 ham bone, and $0.59 worth of Devon:

Meat, glorious meat. I bought one slice of devon for each day remaining.

The hambone was purchased, like a number of foods I’ve eaten this month, because it reminds me of childhood. When I was young, every few weeks, we’d have a big roasted leg of lamb for dinner. My sister and I used to fight over who got the bone; the bone would always have plenty of meat, fat, gristle, and marrow on it. As a child, I could make the bone last a week, until it was white and glistening because I’d eaten every last bit of meat off it.

As I got older, I still enjoyed eating the meat off the bone, but I would only really get a single night’s enjoyment out of it. Also, my sister became a vegetarian, so there wasn’t any competition for it. It stopped being a trophy, and started just becoming food.

The devon was purchased primarily because it was the cheapest meat there, but it too has memories from childhood – on the days that I wasn’t sent to school with noodles for lunch, I had devon sandwiches. Fried devon was one of my favourite dishes as a child too – I might fry up one of these slices in the next few days.

After my meat purchases, I had $1.22 to spend as I pleased. I immediately headed for the chocolate biscuit aisle. Most everything there was, as you’d expect, completely out of my price range, but there was one particular type of biscuit that was deliciously affordable:

Cheap Home Brand biscuits, the world would be a darker place without you.

At $0.65/packet, I could only afford one, but one was all that I needed. I decided on chocolate; I actually prefer the strawberry ones, but I’ve been craving any kind of chocolate for 25 days now.

I’ve mentioned my purchase to a few people already, and the reaction has been the same from all of them:

“Chocolate biscuits!? You’re slowly dying of malnutrition and you waste your money on chocolate biscuits!?!”

Yes. Yes I am. They are divine.

There are twenty in the packet, so I can have five/day.

I considered looking around to see what I could buy with my remaining money, but my maths skills have slowly deteriorated throughout the month, and I couldn’t work out if I was 8 cents under or 12 cents over or neither or both. (both was pretty unlikely, I admit.)

So I rang through my purchases, went home, took photos of all my purchases, and before I started eating anything, worked out the finances to make sure that I was allowed to eat everything.

It would have been terrible to have failed the project four days before the end, because of a simple maths error.

Fortunately, I have 57 cents remaining, and thus was able to chow down with glee! I can have 5 slices of bread, 1 slice of devon, 5 chocolate biscuits, and as much rice as I want every day for the rest of the month.

I haven’t had any rice today, but I’ve had everything else I’m allowed to eat, as well as about 90% of the meat from the ham-bone. I was originally planning on spacing it out – I had roughly a quarter of the ham-bone’s ham, but then my computer started being completely unreasonable, and I felt like kicking something. Instead, I got the ham-bone out of the fridge, and rewarded myself by eating most of the meat.

Someone suggested that I turn it into a stew. I don’t know that just boiling the ham-bone in water is going to produce much of a meal; generally a stew has some additional ingredients, such as vegetables. I enjoyed just eating the meat off it more, I suspect, than I would have enjoyed “hot ham water”.

Any suggestions for what I should spend my 57 cents on?

Tomorrow: Daily update!

(total money spent so far – $27.43. Remainder – $0.57)

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)

The exact same weight as the last three days. Looks like this is going to be my finishing weight for February!

Graph:

Oh god...it's flatlining!

Today has been an extremely lazy day. I slept for about 8 or 9 hours, and then had another long nap this afternoon.

Both of my housemates had pizza tonight. I am counting down not only the days until this experiment is over, but the hours and the minutes as well. In five days time, I am going to be at the pancake manor, ordering food. In five days and 31 minutes time, I am going to be eating my apple bavarian crepes. In five days and roughly one hour’s time, I will have finished my crepes, and quite possibly my steak as well. In five days and one hour and maybe ten minute’s time, I might be on my knees, throwing up into the toilet.

I don’t think that’s what is going to happen, but it’s definitely a possibility. Want to see for yourself, first-hand? Come along to the “End of 28 Days, 28 Dollars Celebration”, at the Pancake Manor, on February the 28th, at 11:30pm! (Facebook event.) I’ll be there, carrying this penguin (for ease of recognition): 

If you can find neither me or my penguin, you may have gone to the wrong pancake manor.

I finished off my bread today. Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I’m going to go down and grab some more.

I work this out every two days, but having rice at the beginning of the day instead of the end means that I don’t nap all day and then write all night.

Someone asked me the other day how I’d been coping without sugar. Obviously I haven’t been able to afford chocolate, or pure sugar, or any of the other treats that we normally identify with sugar, but white bread is packed full of it, and apparently my soy sauce has a bit of sugar in it as well. The apple that I had on Day 10 was probably full of “natural sugar”.

I’ve mostly been missing meat, tea, and spaghetti bolognaise.

When I started this project, I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t learn much from it. I already appreciated food; I tried to enjoy every mouthful, I delighted in eating, all of that. The experiment wasn’t a self-improvement exercise, it wasn’t intended to make me realise how much I took food for granted…the aim, pure and simple, was to see what happened, because I was interested. See how I’d cope, see how much it would affect my brain.

(a lot, by the way, much more than I ever imagined. It takes all of my mental energy to put these posts together, and about three times as long as it should. I’m always feeling grumpy, and I haven’t been able to put together a script for weeks now. I have to think long and hard to come up with a funny line in everyday conversation, and I’ve been snappy and hazy for a while now.)

I don’t think, after this month, that I’m ever going to look at food the same way again. Every aspect of food, from the smell to the price to the texture to the  nutritional value to (obviously) the taste will have a completely new meaning to me. I have learned about proteins and fats and all of the omegas, and the difference between Low-GI and High-GI foods. The smell of food was not something that I used to notice, except for extreme cases (when milk was off; the smell of garlic permeating everything nearby) and the variety of tastes and textures that come with different foods is something that I’m amazed at how much I’ve missed.

Especially texture. Rice and bread have different textures, but there are so many more out there – the smooth meltiness of chocolate, the crispiness of wafers, the variety that come with a steak…even the simple chip.

But more than anything, I’m going to be aware of the price of food. I don’t think it will particularly affect my buying habits – if it’s an extra dollar to add cheese to a burger, I’m not going to stop myself because it’s a day’s worth of food – but I’ll definitely notice every cent that I spend on food.

I’ve also become a lot more aware of a lot of the culture around food – I was doing an advertisement for an Italian Nursing Home, and after we’d finished shooting for the day, the Italian lady in charge offered us a meal. My fellow crew members accepted gratefully, and I was left saying “No, no, I can’t.”

It felt a bit ridiculous explaining the project, so I just claimed that I had some allergies. I’ve also used “I’m on a specialised diet” as an excuse when I’m not in the mood to explain exactly what’s happening.

I attend a number of different social events each week – a number of them in pubs. I’ve never before noticed how generous everyone I know is; I’ve had to turn down almost as much food as I’ve eaten this month.

My point is that it was a little naive of me to predict that I wouldn’t learn anything this month. It’s been ridiculously educational, not only the numerous links that people have emailed me, but observations about what food means to my body, the people I know, and culture in general. It’s been a good month.

Fuck am I going to be glad when it’s over.

Tomorrow: Daily update!

(total money spent so far – $24.46. Remainder – $3.54 – enough for three loaves of bread, with 27 cents left over!)

The same as yesterday...again.

68.8kg (31.207 pounds) is the exact same weight as yesterday.

There’s really only so much I can say about that.

It's borifying the graph.

It’s looking more and more like the random weight-loss on Day 18 will be the lowest point of the month. Perhaps I’ve stabilised, and will stay at68.8kg for the next 6 days.

By the way…6 days! That’s less than a week! You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to this wretched experiment being over.

I’m out of bread, so I’ve got to remember to pick some up in the next day or so. I used the last of it today – two slices were eaten with a tiny smidgen of butter on each (I’m rationing it) and the other two were toasted. I didn’t get a chance to eat those before going to improv class, so I had to just keep them in my bag until the break. They were slightly stale, but mostly delicious!

I also remembered to make the right amount of rice today.

Last night, I finally got around to giving “congee” a go. Suggested way back on Day 14, congee is a different way of cooking the rice – instead of just throwing it in the rice-cooker until it’s cooked, I put a cup of rice and six cups of water into a big pot, and put it on a low temperature for six hours.

The results were…less than ideal:

The spoon was for tasting!

The rice cooked, and then the water slowly began turning into what I assume congee looks like, but before it could really start doing that, it all began to burn. The result was partially burned rice in a strange viscous liquid.

Hell, maybe that’s what congee is. I’m not really sure.

It tasted like slightly burned rice, but without the ricey texture that I’m familiar with. It was strange and unsettling, and I’ve decided that perhaps congee isn’t for me. I’ll just make do with regular rice for the next few days.

No problems with functioning today – I’m still slightly hazy, but that’s become standard. I just hope that I don’t have any brain cells permanently dying off. I don’t drink or smoke or sniff paint or take steroids, or participate on any of the other activities on this list (except maybe avoiding exercise), so my brain cells seem to be pretty safe. Hopefully I will not lose too many in the next 6 days!

February 28th is when the experiment ends, and I’m celebrating with a trip to the Pancake Manor. I’ll be getting there around 11:30 – please feel free to join us! For ease of organising, I’ve made an event on Facebook. Go and tick the little “attending” box – it should be a fun night!

From the comments:

Dan Beeston:

Wade thinks that when you have your first real meal on Saturday night that you’re going to toss it all back up again. Either that, or it’ll go straight through you. Either way, I can’t wait to find out. Make sure someone is at hand to take photos.

This is quite a popular opinion, actually. I’ve had a number of people tell me that there’s no way I’ll be able to stomach the steak. Dad suggested starting with stewed tomatoes, and building up from there, but I prefer to do things by extremes – I’ll start with the Bavarian Apple Crepes, my favourite dish at the Manor, and then I’ll have a steak, medium-rare. I’ll have a few of the potato chips, just to warm me up, then I’ll dig in. The crepes will probably cause a sugar rush.

I have been planning that meal in a lot of detail for quite a while now.

There will definitely be digital cameras there, and I’ll probably bring a video camera as well. If I do end up throwing everything straight up, you’ll be able to see footage of it on YouTube the next day, I promise you that. (if it “goes straight through me”, no, there won’t be YouTube footage.)

28th of February, 11:30pm. Mark it in your diaries.

I can guarantee that none of you are looking forward to it as much as I am.

Tomorrow: Daily Post!

(total money spent so far – $24.46. Remainder – $3.54 - enough for three loaves of bread, with 27 cents left over!)

68.8kg - same weight as yesterday.

I have neither gained nor lost weight since yesterday.

How uneventful.

If I were a weightologist, I'm sure I could find a pattern. I'm not, and I can't.

I found my weight from a few weeks before I started the project; I gave blood on January 6th, and documented the process for a Facebook album. The first thing they do is weigh you:

I was wearing matching socks that day! How come the opposite of "odd socks" isn't "even socks"?

Now, when you’re weighing yourself to give blood, they don’t require you to strip down. So I went and put on the clothes that I was wearing that day, and weighed myself once with them, and once without them – the difference was 0.9kg. I don’t have to add the weight of the camera, because I was holding it at the time I took this photo, just like the daily weigh-ins here.

Assuming that I didn’t gain or lose a significant amount of weight in a month (which is, I admit, quite a large assumption) we can estimate my starting weight for this project to be around 74.7kg.

I won’t be putting this on any graphs, because it’s horribly unscientific, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I really regret not weighing myself on the first day!

Today I accidentally made much less rice than usual – I wasn’t paying attention while I was pouring it into my trusty rice cooker, and by the time I realised, it was time to go. I’ve started improv classes with Impro Mafia (in addition to the classes I’m currently taking with Edge Improv.) I did okay in class; at one point, we were supposed to do an activity where we ran around the room being extremely excited by everything, but I couldn’t really muster up the energy. I pretended, but my heart wasn’t really in it.

After the class, I went and saw a couple of movies with my cousin (Ghost Town and Zack and Miri Make a Porno - both extremely funny films.) He, not participating in a ridiculous experiment this month, bought a packet of M&Ms, and I was reminded again how much my sense of smell has improved this month. I should join the police force and track down chocolate-thieves.

I once more didn’t eat my full quota of 8 slices of bread today. I find myself toasting about half of my bread each day, because toasted bread doesn’t need butter. I am fast running out of butter.

Next month’s project:

I have, as mentioned yesterday, decided to postpone the project I had planned for next month. (eating a different meal three times a day for a month, not repeating any meals.) This is for three reasons:

1. At the end of this month of extremely limited eating, I don’t really want to dive straight into another experiment which limits my diet. For the next month or two, if I want to eat something, I’m going to eat it. Limiting myself to three different foods/day means that I can’t eat nothing but spaghetti bolognaise for a week if I want to.
2. I went straight from StinkyPete, which updated daily, to 28 Days, 28 Dollars which updated  daily…I want a break from updating daily for a while.
3. I really like the name Gour-May.

So in May of this year, I’ll be doing the Gour-May project!

I’ll continue to update this website, but not with a set project – it’ll be whatever’s on my mind at the time. Webcomic reviews, writing theory, maybe more about Serial Killers. I will also be hosting a guest experiment. More on that closer to the date!

Tomorrow: Daily update!

(total money spent so far – $24.46. Remainder – $3.54 - enough for three loaves of bread, with 27 cents left over!)