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What are your tips for reducing spending?
Two Mondays ago, I mentioned that we cut back on spending in 2009, and Chez Julie asked me to share some of my tips. What a great idea!
I have a lot of tips and I bet commenters will too – so don’t feel bad if you can’t read them all – PLEASE SHARE your ideas!
I broke my tips into three categories: Shopping, Entertainment and General. Click “more” to read (skim, really) on.
I am temporarily leaving my foggy/quiet state of mind to tell you that there has been a surveillance camera permanently installed my office’s break room.
To find out who is stealing people’s lunches.
I am serious.
Does anyone else find this hilarious?
Surprisingly, I have not yet been a victim. No one seems interested in my veggie sticks, hummus, and vegan hot dogs!
I have an appointment tonight, as well as guests in town, so I decided to get my run in during lunch, in the office gym. I was really looking forward to it all morning, hoping that it would break up the monotony of the day and get me energized for the afternoon.
But instead of having a carefree, relaxing run like I usually do, I ended up stressing out about work issues and watching the clock the entire time. I had to rush to get 3 miles in, then shower and get ready to go back to my desk (in one hour).
It feels good to have the run out of the way, but it wasn’t the quality I wanted it to be. I didn’t get to de-stress at all.
My marathon training schedule starts next Monday, and I think I am going to have to fit lunch time runs in a couple of times a week. Maybe next time it will be sunny and NOT raining*, so I can get outside and enjoy the run more.
Warning: exercise seems to be one of the only things I feel like writing about right now, so you’ll probably get a lot of that.
*This is June, right?
I get a lot of comments at work like, “your lunch is so healthy,” “your snacks are so healthy,” “you always eat so healthy,” “do you count carbs or calories?”* “what do I need to eat to lose weight?” “when is your next run?” “what do I need to do to start running?”**
I think that people think I am some sort of… health freak? They see me walking around with an apple, or eating my homemade granola bar, or getting fresh veggies out of the fridge for lunch, and think I am super focused on eating healthy ALL THE TIME.
Ha. Ha ha. I WISH! While it is my goal to get closer and closer to eating a healthy, fresh diet most of the time, I am totally not there yet.
I have two secrets to share:
The second secret pretty much cancels out the first one.*** Because, I can feel the small amount of extra weight and it is slowing me down a bit during my runs. I can feel it shaking in my butt.
AND, it’s NO BIG DEAL! I was stressed out, I was eating emotionally, blah blah blah, what did I expect to happen? Mathematically, I knew my calories in was higher than my calories out, even when running 20+ miles a week. I just chose to ignore it for awhile. Because I am human, and I cannot eat perfectly all the time, no matter how hard I try. And I don’t even WANT to eat perfectly all the time. How boring would that be?
Anyway, it makes me laugh at work when I get SO MANY comments on what I am eating and how healthy it is, because I do not “eat healthy” all of the time and I don’t think of the food I eat during the day as “healthy,” I think of it as the food I want to eat – fruit, veggies, whole wheat crackers, granola bars, cereal, veggie dogs, etc.
The good thing is, when people keep saying that to me, it encourages me. It keeps me going. It reminds me that I do need to be making conscious, healthy choices most of the time. And not just “for show” (which it’s not), but because I want to.
So even though the comments do get annoying from time to time (I mean, come on, can I just prepare my lunch in peace?!), I am going to channel it into good – encouragement.
And I am going to quit all of that mindless gosh darn**** snacking.
*Give me a freakin’ break. I am NOT afraid of carbs.
**My punctuation kind of went to crap in this paragraph.
***So I think I will try to finish in under 30 minutes.
****This is me not swearing.
Do you “brown-bag” your lunch or a lunch for your kids/family members? How often?
A little blurb in the April issue of Marie Claire made me think about this. They had a little chart that compared the cost of making a sandwich at home, to buying one at Subway. They concluded that the cost was so close ($5.01 vs. $5.59), it might not even be worth the effort to make the sandwich at home.
Hmm.
I bring my lunch to work every day of the week, unless I have a planned lunch date. I usually only have one lunch date a week (with my favorite lunch buddy, diane), but this week, I had THREE lunch dates – one every single day I was at work!
It’s expensive to eat out downtown every day. But some people do. I know people at my old office who did. And I am sure there are people at my new office who do as well. I’d rather have it be a treat, then do it every day. Three days in a row was too much this week.
I never thought the term “retail therapy” applied to me. Even though I have spent a few lunch breaks walking up and down State Street, wandering in and out of stores I had visited only a week or so before… I just thought I was looking for “essentials” for my work wardrobe.
Right.
Now that I have cut back on that (really, I have most of what I need) I realize that shopping was just a replacement for what I used to do during my lunch break to get away from work stress for awhile – eat eat EAT!
Don’t worry – I didn’t waste a lot of money, or even spend that many days at the stores, I just realized when I was out there, I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular. I was just looking for a mental break.
For a few months, I have been eating my lunch at my desk. Every day.
I hate this. It makes me feel anti-social. And it doesn’t really count as a mental break. Even if I am sitting there, reading email or blogs, or whatever.
Somedays, I don’t even leave the floor of my building.
Which must be why I liked going to shops. It just got me out of the building. And may be why I would run around outside looking for treats, before I started my healthy lifestyle quest.
We have a “break room.” But you know what? I can’t eat in there. I can’t sit still, and watch people eat their lunch. Without craving something more than mine. I am not starving myself, but I am grazing – I eat small things throughout the day. It actually feels great. But sitting down, and seeing someone eat so much more, along with trying to make small chat – I can’t do it. It makes me all nervous and antsy and depressed. It affects my ENTIRE day.
And I can’t take my small lunch back there and make it last very long. I already eat fast, and I am not eating much. So put those two together – why even go back there?
When I lived and worked in Rome, I did this as well. Only, we HAD to leave the office during lunch. So I would walk around and see the sights, eating my small lunch. Why can’t I do that here?
Yeah, ideally, I wouldn’t be this weird about food.
I hate it when I plan on attending something, or even make an appointment to attend something, and don’t feel like going to it at the last minute. That happened a lot in college. I would plan on attending a guest lecture or something, then decide I’d rather stay at home and have dinner, work, relax, eat, whatever (of course, I still went to Michael Moore, Barack Obama, Morgan Spurlock and Steven Holl’s lectures).
Lately it’s been these townhome association meetings. Well, there have only been two of them, but they are at 7:00 pm, require me leaving work at 5:00, and eat up more of my night then I’d like. But hey, if we’re going to bitch and moan about what’s going on in our neighborhood, we better make an appearance at the meetings, and become involved, right?
Anyway, I told one of our reps I would go out to lunch with her today. This will probably be good for me to learn to be social and interact with other people in the industry, but when I woke up today… I just didn’t feel like it. I think I’d rather sit at my desk and sleep eat. Or stay at home and sleep. Or something like that.
I’m sure by lunch time I’ll feel like doing it. But right now, I just feel BLAH.
I just realized I brought peach-flavored yogurt and a peach in my lunch today.
Duh. That makes me feel kind of dumb. At least one is “dairy” and one counts as “fruit.”
When my class was learning about the food pyramid in grade school, our teacher gave us each a sheet of white glossy square stickers with pictures of different foods on them. He also gave us sheets of paper that had an illustration of a plate on it. Our task in class was to put “well-balanced” meals on the plate based on what we were learning.
For some reason, the local television crew decided to come and interview my class to do a little human interest story (I guess news was slow that day). They interviewed a few of us, and we showed them our little papers with our stickers on them, with the crude drawings of corn, chicken legs, apples, etc.
I eagerly awaited watching the story on the news that night. To my dismay, they showed a shot of the entire class working, with the reporter talking in front of us, then interviewed only one kid.
A few of us were pretty bummed the next day. We had worked really hard on our “balanced” meals, and thought they would show them on tv.
Our teacher was more upset about what was on the kid’s plate that they did show – mashed potatoes, french fries, and tater tots.
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Today’s Idiom: red-letter day – day of happiness, time for rejoicing (holidays are red-letter days on our calendars)
My red-letter day came when I received a job offer before graduation. I felt like I had nothing to worry about anymore.
Idioms, Life
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food, Food Pyramid, idiom, lunch, red-letter day
I hate packing my lunch in the morning, counting calories, looking at nutrition labels, taking mental notes. Caring.
Actually, I hate packing a lunch at all. Why can’t I just get some takeout at work? Not caring?
Just kidding. Just kidding. I care about my health. And my money (because takeout adds up!).
But sometimes it’s hard to be a healthy adult. I have the sugary appetite of a child, but the mental state of an adult who knows better.
I’m working on that…
Hi! I'm Kim, a 34-year-old living in Chicagoland with my husband, Steven, and our cats, Khali, Apollo, and Starbuck. I work in the design industry (architecture), follow a vegan lifestyle, am addicted to running, and am an ACE certified personal trainer (working at Essential Fitness, LLC ("Efit"))! I write about a variety of topics, and consider this a "life" blog - a place I can share anything that's on my mind. Please visit the "About" page to get a better idea of who I am! :-)
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