Below is my daily menu for the Live Below the Line Challenge.  I’ll be having the same thing every day except Friday. That day I will have my breakfast meal twice and a burrito for dinner.

It looks like I didn’t do a very good job with my shopping.  My daily calorie count is too low. In order to get enough calories I needed to buy food that was higher in fat and/or sugar. I will have a little bit of cereal and milk left over so I could add in a couple bowls of cereal somewhere.

Since I’m about 40-50 pounds overweight and the challenge is only for 5 days it wouldn’t be impossible to get by on this level of calories.  That being said,  I have full day continuing legal education classes on Wednesday and Friday.  There will be free food provided there and I most likely will eat some of that free food.  Doing so will mean I fail the challenge but I’m ok with that. If I can go Monday through Friday without spending anything on food I’ll feel like I accomplished something. For me the challenge is more about exerting a little self control over what I eat more than it is about seeing how little I can spend on food each day.

This menu may seem unhealthy to many of you, but it is actually healthier than what I usually eat.  Compared to my usual diet of fast food, soda, chips and other junk food this menu isn’t that bad.  Also, I will be having at least a little bit of fruit and vegetable each day which is not usually the case. This challenge does show that it is very difficult to eat healthy on such a low budget.  Healthy foods such as vegetables just don’t have enough calories per dollar to make up much of a super low budget diet. I might use the knowledge gained from this challenge to do the challenge again next month and see if I can come up with a healthier menu that provides a higher number of calories.

I’m going to be doing my version of the Live Below the Line Challenge for the next 5 days. After reading about the Live Below the Line Challenge in a post at My Money Blog, I decided to to do the challenge myself.  The basic idea of the challenge is that you eat for $1.50 a day for five days.  The $1.50 a day represents the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line.  The purpose of the challenge is to raise money to fight poverty.  I’ll be making a donation when I complete the challenge and if you want you can visit the challenge site and donate as well.

The official challenge is April 29-May 3, but I’m starting my challenge today.  This works out better for me since I’m impatient and want to start now.  Also I have CLEs next Wednesday and Friday with free food and since I these CLEs are expensive I want to get my full value out of them. My April Food Challenge was a failure but I think I can do this challenge since it is only 5 days.  According to the rules of the challenge the full cost of all items consumed must be included in the budget. This means I can’t buy a jumbo bag of rice and only count the cost of what I eat. That would make the challenge too easy.  The challenge does allow spices to be prorated or sharing food costs between people.  Too keep things simple though I just did one $7.50 shopping trip and that will be the only food I eat for the next five days.  I’ve listed the food I bought and the cost below.  I’m going to post every day of the challenge sharing what I ate for the day.

The total came out to less than $7.50 but I’m not including sales tax.  I’ll probably add a little salsa to my burrito and that prorated cost would use up the remaining money.  It isn’t the healthiest menu although it is probably better than what I normally eat. I’ll be having cereal with a banana for breakfast and a hot dog and beans with carrots on the side for lunch and dinner four days. The last day I’ll be eating cereal twice and have the burrito for dinner. I have ten bananas so I can also have a banana as a snack sometime during the day.  I got chocolate milk because it was on sale for less than skim milk and I needed to stretch my money as much as possible.  I could have done this even cheaper by buying dry beans instead of pork and beans or just buying oatmeal instead of cereal and milk.  I’m lazy though and wanted stuff that was easy to make and I know I’d get tired of oatmeal after a couple of days.  I haven’t figured out the calories and nutrition yet.  I’ll share that information when I post my daily meals.