Closing out week 3 of the $3 diet, we are on the home stretch and everything is going great!
I was very pleased to step on the scale this morning and weigh in at 184.5 - a 14.3 pound loss in 21 days!
Even if you take the last few days before the start of the experiment as an anomaly and say the real starting weight was about 194 - this is still 10 pounds in 21 days.
The real issue here is money, of course. So from the above chart you can see that I have stayed below the $3 limit every day, on average spending $2.44, while getting a reasonable average calorie intake of 1,683 per day. As I have been saying, with the excess cash I could easily add several hundred more calories of rice or bread to the diet (brown rice is amazingly cheap at about $0.03 per serving, equal to 160 calories). I could also have eaten more frozen vegetables - something I am now striving to do. For example, I had a bowl of frozen corn (reheated of course) after dinner on Day 20 when I realized I had plenty of calories and money left.
This is a little bit of a game, so I have been perhaps overly cautious with my days, aiming to have more than a dollar left by dinner time to make sure I'm not miserable at night. I find it much harder to be hungry at night when I have fewer distractions than during the day when I have work to do.
I attribute a big part of the weight loss to not only the relatively low intake, but the persistent output of calories as well, leaving a fairly low balance each day. In the above chart, consumed calories are blue and exercise burned calories are red.
Sleep has been mostly adequate at about 7 hours on average. I feel like 7 hours is what I need to feel good during the day. Less than 6.5 hours on back-to-back days leaves me feeling drained. Less than 6 hours on more than one day back-to-back leaves me with a pretty bad headache. Luckily that hasn't happened during the last three weeks.
I am a habitual stress eater. I reach for chips or cookies when I am having trouble solving a problem. Stopping that behavior is a challenge because when you're stressed, everything else fades into the background, including trying to maintain a healthy diet.
I was very pleased to step on the scale this morning and weigh in at 184.5 - a 14.3 pound loss in 21 days!
Even if you take the last few days before the start of the experiment as an anomaly and say the real starting weight was about 194 - this is still 10 pounds in 21 days.
The real issue here is money, of course. So from the above chart you can see that I have stayed below the $3 limit every day, on average spending $2.44, while getting a reasonable average calorie intake of 1,683 per day. As I have been saying, with the excess cash I could easily add several hundred more calories of rice or bread to the diet (brown rice is amazingly cheap at about $0.03 per serving, equal to 160 calories). I could also have eaten more frozen vegetables - something I am now striving to do. For example, I had a bowl of frozen corn (reheated of course) after dinner on Day 20 when I realized I had plenty of calories and money left.
This is a little bit of a game, so I have been perhaps overly cautious with my days, aiming to have more than a dollar left by dinner time to make sure I'm not miserable at night. I find it much harder to be hungry at night when I have fewer distractions than during the day when I have work to do.
Sleep has been mostly adequate at about 7 hours on average. I feel like 7 hours is what I need to feel good during the day. Less than 6.5 hours on back-to-back days leaves me feeling drained. Less than 6 hours on more than one day back-to-back leaves me with a pretty bad headache. Luckily that hasn't happened during the last three weeks.
I am a habitual stress eater. I reach for chips or cookies when I am having trouble solving a problem. Stopping that behavior is a challenge because when you're stressed, everything else fades into the background, including trying to maintain a healthy diet.
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