Jen's Blog

So we finished our 1 week and $40/ person challenge. It’s been quite an experience. I started out extremely skeptical, and ended feeling really good about it. If you missed some of my posts about the challenge, you can find them all here.

Some things I enjoyed were making meals every night and getting to figure out how to use ingredients we’d already bought in new meals. I’m proud that we almost finished all the food we bought. Even if it was a full tub of sour cream, loaf of french bread, large amount of veggies, etc. We used all of them throughout multiple meals and ended up with very little leftover raw ingredients. 

We did have a few leftover meals. 3 meals to be exact. We ate PB&J very few times for lunch. In fact, we could have done a whole other meal, without buying more food and staying with the same budget, and still staying within the challenge. 

Some of the more difficult part of the challenge for us were:

• Eating lunch in every day. Working downtown I’ve gotten spoiled in running out and grabbing something with coworkers. Eating at the desk was hard.
• Overall there were a TON more dishes to wash. I think we ran the dishwasher (for 2 people) 2-3 times over the week and did a ton of handwashing. Kind of annoying but not the worst overall.
• Weekends are harder. Even if you eat in every day during the week, weekends for me = eating out. Adjusting to the food stamp challenge proved to be difficult. Especially in social situations.

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me throughout the challenge. Ya’ll are awesome, and I absolutely recommend doing the challenge to anyone who mentioned that they wanted to. I would love to do it again soon!