Homemade Challenge and Other Updates
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something. I only include links for products and services I love and believe in. Please check out my disclosure policy for more details!This month, we’ve committed to making as much food in our home as possible, and to ensure we do this, we have only allowed ourselves 9 cheat meals during the month. This means that we will be eating more meals made at home than the American or the French in July (the French eat about 20% of their meals outside of the home, and we’re shooting for 10%. Americans, in comparison, eat about 43% of food out of the home).
So, how have we been doing? Really well, actually. In fact, we’re hoping to make the spirit of the challenge part of our everyday life moving forward. It’s really made us stop and think twice when we’re not feeling particularly motivated to make food – instead of ordering something for pick-up, we think about what we can make homemade that’s low-maintenance. We’ve both noticed more money in our bank accounts, and preparing meals fills us with a sense of accomplishment. Even if we had a very lazy day, we made food for ourselves.
So far we’ve each used one cheat meal. Both were well spent and late in the month. This coming up weekend, we’ll both be very busy, so it’s likely that many of the cheats will occur then. I’m happy to report that we most likely will not be going over 9 cheats, so challenge successful. More to come at the end of the month about the challenge.
Another couple of updates – for those of you who followed my 2014 goal blog post, I’m happy to report that I got into grad school, will be a TA, and my orientation begins next month. I’ll be teaching media writing and my thesis involves food, so I’m sure many blog posts will center around my area of study in the future. Really exciting things on the horizon with that.
I’ve also reached my Challenge Walk MS goal of $1,500, so I will be walking 50 miles this fall to support those living with MS. I’m so happy that I could help bring such a large donation to an extremely deserving cause, and I know the experience will be life-changing. After I do the walk, I will be sure to post about it.
There are many exciting things on the horizon, from the walk and going back to school to getting married next summer, and I hope to post as much as I can about all of it. Please let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see on the blog – comment below or email me at dairyfreestate@gmail.com.
