Monday, April 25, 2011

The Poverty Diet

My current journey toward weight loss began in November 2010 when my car broke and needed to be replaced. I was planning for that car to last me at least another six months, so its replacement was underfunded. I had to empty my bank account for a down payment and live paycheck to paycheck for a couple months. This meant no eating out.

Prior to that, I was eating all of my meals out. Most people react to that with disbelief. Of course, I must be exaggerating. I'm not. I ate lunch and dinner out, and breakfast several times a week. Other days I skipped breakfast or ate snack food. My weight was high 260s (lbs). I was having a lot of problems with asthma, chronic nasal polyps (those are related), and migraines.

Once I started cooking at home, my menu was fairly limited. I mostly ate the same food I ate out, but I was losing weight eating hamburgers, spaghetti and meatballs, and boxed macaroni and cheese. I will discuss that further in a series of articles, because I find it very interesting.

After losing 10-15 lbs, I decided eating at home was a good idea. Now that I can afford to eat out again, I do so infrequently. For me that means once or twice weekly. That proved to be sufficient to maintain the 10-15 lbs lost, but I plateaued there. I'll talk about how I pushed past that plateau in another post.

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