{"id":1251,"date":"2010-12-15T14:00:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T22:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leanmeanvirilemachine.com\/?p=1251"},"modified":"2010-12-15T07:17:06","modified_gmt":"2010-12-15T15:17:06","slug":"the-recession-diet-how-to-eat-like-a-champion-on-48-21-a-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/15\/the-recession-diet-how-to-eat-like-a-champion-on-48-21-a-week\/","title":{"rendered":"The Recession Diet – How to Eat Like a Champion on $48.21 a Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"$50\"<\/a>Let’s face it, the economy sucks.<\/p>\n

Housing bubbles, jobless recoveries, and laughably\u00a0insignificant raises… it’s getting tough to justify spending a lot of money on food.<\/p>\n

But using that as an excuse to simply eat less is wrong-headed. When it comes to optimizing your diet to favor fat loss and muscle growth, quality trumps quantity.<\/p>\n

But eating well on a tight budget is a cinch, and I’m going to prove it to you.<\/p>\n

How Low Can You Go?<\/strong><\/p>\n

With a simple Google search, you can find countless people on a food budget of a dollar a day. It’d be tempting for me to jump on this boat as well…<\/p>\n

…but I suggest you stay as far away from this advice as possible!<\/p>\n

Most of these people are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Eating a lot of junk food.<\/li>\n
  2. Eating fewer calories than their bodies need.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You’ll rarely find good deals on ribeyes and asparagus, but a quick look at the coupon section of your newspaper (yes, they still exist) and you’ll realize that eating on a dollar a day is easy – as long as you are willing to survive on food produced in a factory.<\/p>\n

    Due to generous government subsidies and ginormous marketing budgets, food companies are able to sell their products at rock-bottom prices without the fear of going out of business.<\/p>\n

    Additionally, anyone can live on a dollar a day (for a short time, anyways), if they eat below their body’s energy requirements.<\/p>\n

    Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, this is an unsustainable method that generally results in poorer overall health and, once you fall off the bandwagon, increased fat storage. (The subject of this New York Times article<\/a> struggled with low energy on his dollar-a-day diet, a telltale sign of a compromised metabolism.)<\/p>\n

    Boo. Hiss.<\/p>\n

    For budget eating to be sustainable and healthy, you must:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Eat real food.<\/li>\n
    2. Have your caloric requirements met.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Game on!<\/p>\n

      The Challenge<\/strong><\/p>\n

      I’m going to put my money where my mouth is (quite literally) and show you how you can eat like a champion on $50 a week.<\/p>\n

      Why $50? It’s somewhat arbitrary, but let me explain how I arrived at that number.<\/p>\n

      According to this infographic<\/a>, Americans currently spend $3,465 per person on groceries each year, which equals $66.63 per week.<\/p>\n

      But half of all people earn less<\/em> money than the average, by definition, so we should set the bar even lower.<\/p>\n

      From my research<\/a>, the maximum food stamp allocation in California (where I live) is $200, or roughly $50 per week, which is what someone who is utterly destitute can still count on to survive. This, I believe, truly gives us an idea of the “lower limit” I should be looking at for food spending.<\/p>\n

      But Wait, There’s More…<\/strong><\/p>\n

      As you all know, I am a big proponent of cooking.<\/p>\n

      By buying unprepared food and cooking it yourself, you save a lot of money while reducing the amount of garbage – especially refined vegetable oils, sugars, and processed grains – that ends up in your belly.<\/p>\n

      What you don’t<\/em> save on, I concede, is time. There’s just no way to compete with a microwave dinner that requires only removing it from its package and hitting “start.”<\/p>\n

      But that doesn’t mean we still can’t do it fast<\/em>.<\/p>\n

      In our culture, 30 minute meals seem to be the “holy grail.” If you can spend a half hour working in the kitchen each night and wind up with an edible product, you instantly become a superhero. Probably one of those really fast ones.<\/p>\n

      Multiply that by seven nights a week, and you’ve got 3 1\/2 hours.<\/p>\n

      Sounds like a challenge to me.<\/p>\n

      The Big Haul<\/strong><\/p>\n

      So I went to my local Trader Joe’s to go shopping for a week’s worth of food and came home with what you see here. (Actually, I stopped by the Von’s next door as well, since they had a couple of items I needed.)<\/p>\n