New Year's Resolutions have made it to Lent this year. Sarah (my wife) has been on Weight Watchers for several months now--with relative success, I might add. As house cook, I've been trying to play along, cooking "low point" meals for her in the hopes that my extra poundage might melt away as well. (For those unfamiliar with WW, participants get a certain number of points each day, and everything eaten deducts from those points). While she's beating me by a healthy margin, I'm definitely dropping a few pounds myself. Not encouraging was the recent health assessment I took for the U. I may have earned $65 for doing it, but I'm officially about 30 pounds more than I should be.
Anyway, I saw our general eating habits as fairly healthy before. We rarely ate fried foods or lots of meat. No processed foods and snacks seemed generally healthy. But on the plan, things have definitely trimmed down. For one thing, our cheese consumption has dropped dramatically. I'm also using much less oil in cooking. Some changes I'm not too crazy about, like the weight watchers branded bread that may only be 1 point for two slices, but tastes like stale air. Low fat sour cream seems like an oxymoron. But there's been benefits, too, like a lower grocery bill, since I've been using low point leftovers for lunch more consistently.
Which brings me to the other point. Now that grad school is firmly a part of Sarah's life, we're trying to keep the financial debt to a minimum. That's been difficult, even though our tax return last year still places us solidly in the 50th percentile nationally. So as a part of "trimming down," I've been trying to keep a closer track on our purchases. Again, I didn't think we were bad before. We had a budget, and I used Microsoft Money to keep track of our spending. But now that I'm simply downloading our purchases from the bank every week or so, I have a much more "real" sense of what we're spending money on. That $45 at Target for a few things around the house starts to seem more significant. Gladly, we've been able to trim down a little more there as well.
All in all, as Lent begins, I feel like I'm counting points in several parts of my life--diet, finances, even time. It feels good in a "let's get some discipline" kind of way. But it's also a very rule bound way of living. I'm not sure yet how that makes me feel.