Dining in challenge!
What’s the biggest money-waster in your budget – and the easiest to fix? For us, it’s eating out. What’s the worst part of your diet? For us again, it’s eating out. Even when we don’t try very hard to “diet”, we eat pretty healthily at home, but it’s easy to consume 1000+ calories in a single meal at a restaurant without even noticing.
I’m working on getting our records straight to do taxes, and noticed that we have 120 entries totalling $2900 listed under dining out in 2008. I’m not through yet, and that may well include vacation meals and business travel meals, but still… YIKES. How on earth did that happen? It certainly wasn’t PLANNED that way. The majority of that happened on days when I didn’t have a plan, or wasn’t watching the time, and so we ran out for fast food. If we had eaten expensive convenience or gourmet food from the grocery store instead of all that, we could have still saved $1500. If we had prepared a typical meal for our family (mostly scratch), we could have saved $1800. If we had prepared low cost meals at home, we could have saved more than $2000. And the calories! My typical McDonald’s meal (Big N Tasty Burger, Super size fries and a diet Coke) has 1250 calories. My husband’s (double QP with cheese, super fries, large Sprite) has 1490. IN ONE MEAL! What if we had saved 600 calories off of 120 meals through the year? That would be 72,000 calories – more than TWENTY pounds!
Eating out may be good for the economy, but I would rather support the economy through my local grocery store. Wouldn’t you? So here’s my challenge to you – how long can you go without any unplanned dining out? (Planned celebrations don’t count against you, unless you pay with a credit card that has a balance or you go over 1000 calories on the meal!)
Leave comments here to let me know how you’re doing! Today is day 1!
January 13th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
With the loss income and the hospital stay, needless to say we are eating at home. Our one treat this month was the Woman’s Breakfast for church, that was Casey & I and in the end, Mimi paid our tab.
We are planning on being out Saturday to visit Kelli, so we will be eating out at that time. I think I will go to Sonic and have one of those southwest grilled chicken salads, no dressing. That’s not a bad thing and I like it without the dressing.
Dining at home is going to be a big challenge for us, all year 2009. Someone has to start making a dent in a 9 day hospital bill. OUCH!
I accept this challenge.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I’m kind of, sort of in on the challenge, Carol. We haven’t eaten out since the weekend.. as I was typing that DH suggested we go out for lunch! We did! ha! Anyway, we’re doing pretty good on this challenge… til today.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
You can slip up and get back in again, Denise! We had a very close call today for lunch. I had absolutely no time, so whatever I imagined we were going to do was not going to work, so I asked my mother to stop by the store and get us some lunchmeat and meet me at home. She pulled up the same time I did, and I slapped together two sandwiches, grabbed my water bottle and an apple and dashed out the door again. I count that a victory! Only thinking about $2000 and 20 pounds kept me from fast food today.