Weight Wait : Slow Progress, but Progress None the Less

Getting below 215 pounds has been a drudgefully slow experience like trudging through deep snow made ofmolasses. I would get down to 215, then bounce around between the 215 and 220 marks on the scale for a few days, then back down to 215. This has been going on basically for the last month.

It didn't help that we went to visit grandpa-inlaw or that my dad and siblings came into town (and treated us to dinner several times). It didn't help that the frozen lunches I had made to bring to lunch were meat-and-potatoes type meals. And it certainly didn't help that I was doing consulting instead of exercising in the evenings.

Hooray!

That's behind me now though! (I hope!). For the last four or five days I've now been bouncing between 214 and 217. My spreadsheet says that I need to lose 0.5297 pounds per week for the rest of the year to reach my goal. I would rather do better than that so that in November and December I'm not trying to lose weight over the holidays (just trying to maintain it).

Plan : Eat Less, Garden More

Being a highly environmentally conscious person (joke), I've been known to eat the remaining four pieces of sausage just so we don't use a ziplock and put them in the fridge. After I've already had breakfast. Including three pieces of sausage.

My new plan is the same as the old plan. Eat less, exercise more. Here are the specifics:

1) I'll leave half of my lunch in my scooter's trunk. If I really get hungry or stay late, I can go get it. If I don't use it for lunch it I can eat it for dinner.

2) I'll go weed the garden like I should be doing anyways. I should probably weed for 30 minutes two or three times a week to keep them under control. That's more exercise than I'm getting now and as long as I do it near dusk I enjoy being outside.

Weighing Less Is Nice

Weighing about 215 is a nice feeling. I have more energy, my clothes fit better, I probably even get better gas mileage on my scooter. The best thing for me so far though was that when some friends invited us to go to the pool last week I didn't feel embarrassed when I took off my shirt.

Groceries Without the Games

What's the Grocery Game

If you've been to a couple of personal finance blogs you've probably heard of "The Grocery Store Game". If not, here's a story on it over at Get Rich Slowly. The idea is that you combine coupons in such a way that you get most of your groceries and toiletries for very little cost.

It's Hard Work

Frankly, it seems like a lot of work. You have to go through all the store fliers each week, find the best coupon deals, find the manufacturer's coupons that match with the fliers coupons, etc. Oh. Then you have to drive to each of the different grocery stores and get all those deals, figure out what meals you can make with whatever products you may have been able to get for cheap.

As noted in the comments of the story over at GRS, most of the goods are actually toiletries or unhealthy foods. For me, I don't think it's worth the work.

Saving 14.5% On Groceries With (almost) No Work

As you'll see below, I save 14.5% on groceries before coupons even enter in to the equation. The process I use depends on the store having the two programs I use in place, so my process may not work for you.

Of course, playing the grocery game depends on you having the right big-chain stores in your area anyways, so I think this is a viable alternative for many people who could play the grocery store game.

Full Sheet : http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pFOJsib3bG6Gbi-GWZVFXRA

Here are the factors that let us save 14.5% whenever we get groceries:

• Grocery Gift Cards
  • Our grocery store sells gift cards which give you a 10% bonus. Eg. Buy a $300 gift card, get a $330 gift card. We bought $1200 of cards five weeks ago.


• Buy the Gift Card on your cash-back Credit Card
  • We get 1% on our Credit Card purchases. That's $12 back on our $1200 purchase


• 5% Student Discount Card
  • The grocery store has a special student affiliate card which gives you 5% off your purchase beyond the normal affiliate card price. My wife is still a student, so I don't think this is dishonest in the least.

Affiliate Card Price Caveat

The grocery store we go to doesn't always have the best overall prices, however when using the affiliate card the prices are competitive with other stores in the area. For this reason, I do not include the "mark down" that the affiliate card gives us. That mark down is only present because they mark the prices up for anyone who doesn't have the card.

Downsides

1) Be sure that the grocery store you do this at is one that you like, otherwise you get stuck with $1200+ of gift cards locked up in the one store.

2) It's easier to be spendy if you're spending gift-card money than real money.

3) You have to put down a large chunk of money right at the start. If the 10% bonus is going to be an ongoing thing, we will buy the smallest denomination possible, and leave the rest of the money in our ING account to further stretch our grocery money.

Real Life

Between May 9th and June 16th we bought $306.94 worth of groceries for a cost of $265.08. Considering that we had agreed to increase our grocery spending (we did) and decrease our eating out (we did!) we are about where we expected to be for grocery spending for the month.

Other

I have no idea where the extra $41.86 I saved went. Probably into my ING account...

Wii Fit, Gym Membership, Stroller or Something else?

Weight Weight, Don't Tell Me

I've hit a weight floor it seems. I've gotten down to 215 pounds (From a new-years weight of 240) three times now, and each time I'm back at 220 a few days later. I realize that I should expect fluctuations, but this has been over a three week period, so I'm starting to worry that I'm going to have to change my methods a bit more.

My weight loss plan thus far has mainly been eating less and eating more responsible foods. I have been playing more sports than I did last year, but no one would ever call twice a month a workout plan.

Added to the mix is the fact that my wife is now fully recovered from the baby we had two months ago, and is also wanting to lose weight. We've both agreed that we need to be more active to achieve our goals, the question now is : What form of activity would fit our lifestyles the best?

What would you get?

In an ideal world an exercise purchase would :

• Cost very little


• Be usable any time day or night


• Be something we could do no matter the weather


• Be fun


• Would let us work around the kids


• Help us lose weight


• Be something we could do together


• Be something we could do outside

The current candidates are : A Wii Fit, A gym membership or a double stroller.

The Wii Fit fits most of those options, but we're afraid we'd get bored, we're not sure if it would actually burn enough calories to make a difference,

A double stroller would let us go running / walking outside, but winter here involves snow and ice, and it rains from time to time too. We're not entirely comfortable walking around our neighborhood at 1:00 AM when we're done with projects either.

A gym membership would be fun, and they'd watch the kids, but a family pass at the local rec. center is $30/month, more than we'd like to be paying.

Compromises

I don't think there is anything that will perfectly fit our needs, and we're ready to compromise. The question is where to compromise. Do we compromise on cost with a gym membershipt? Do we decide we'll get a stroller and use it now through October (when it will get too cold)? Do we get a Wii Fit with the risk that we won't like it or that it won't be effective enough?

What would you do in our situation?

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Image from Prognatis' Flickr photo stream

Categorizing My Monthly Spending

When we used our accounts at Wells Fargo, we could see a categorical breakdown of our expenses, but only for the Credit Card. My current Credit Union doesn't offer this functionality, but I had a driving need to know where my money was going.

Initially I would download the .csv (comma separated values) files, and manually sort them out into categories on a spreadsheet.

Of course, that grew old quickly, and I was forced to search the internet for something better. Coming up empty handed, I wrote my own script to sort out my different expenses into categories.

You run it on the command line like so

./statementToCategories.pl list.csv of.csv account.csv statements.csv

It will ask you how to categorize different expenses, and when it sees them again, it will remember what you entered last time. When it's done, it will ask you what to save the file as, and will create a .csv file with the different categories, and how much was spent in each category. It will also tell you how much you spent in each category in an average month.

With that data you can make charts, make plans and moan about how much you wasted on eating out....

You can find the script here:

http://richerandbetter.blogspot.com/2000/01/statementtocategoriespl.html

The script is in Perl, since that's what I'm comfortable with, and it probably won't work as-is for you, unless your bank/credit union lets you download .csv files with the same format as mine does, and you're running Linux. You are free to edit the script however you want and redistribute it.

I have no idea if the .csv files I download are some banking standard, or if they're just the way my credit union decided to make them.

I like to eat

I like to eat. A lot.

My preference is to eat until I'm full, then continually top off for the next couple of hours while hanging out with friends and family. You know, like at thanksgiving time.

That eating style, along with being busy as a student and working full time (no time to excercise) left me at 240 pounds at the end of Christmas break in December 2007.

Recognizing that 240 pounds is too much for a 6 foot 3 inch guy, I looked around to see what I should be weighing, in order to be healthy. I know there are a lot of ways to calculate what's healthy, I ended up deciding to target a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI).

Using the handy calculator at http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/, I found that I need to be below 200 pounds!

New Years being what it is, I decided to try to lose 40 pounds by next new years. That is:

• I will weight 200 pounds by December 31, 2008

As a non-specific sub goal, I'd like to be more active and live a more healthy lifestyle. Don't get me wrong, there's little I enjoy more than a good solid meal at a churrascaria, but I don't want to be obese anymore.

Later this week I will outline my weight loss plan, and how it relates to finances.