I wrote about my brilliant idea about a month ago. In order to save the money for a plane ticket to India we would only eat out once a month for 3 months. I also confessed how the first evening I was already whining, complaining , having some difficulties. The first month is over so here is my report.
First a rule I don't think I shared. We only agreed to limit our eating out with each other. If we were out and the other was not present then the agreement did not exist, although we could certainly curtail our eating out with others. This was because most of the time we eat out together, so just shutting that off would be a lot. Also sometimes it is hard to make other friends agree or understand the weirdness, so it was just a thing between us.
So back to the first month we failed in the strictest sense but did manage to basically change our habits so in that sense we won.
When we ate out:
-the weekend we closed on the cottage. Take out one evening and breakfast out. It was so incredibly stressful in other ways, and we didn't have running water which made cooking very challenging, well we gave ourselves a by.
-appetizer and drinks while out celebrating a good friend's recent homeopathic school [4 years] graduation. There was no way we were going to be there, so we compromised.
-gave in and bought a burrito one evening, in order to limit impact we shared it.
-breakfast up north while at the cottage, you know cause we had no water and we want to support local businesses and...we so caved.
We also ate out with friends on April 30 for Dining for Life. This was our planned treat. It was nice of us to let someone else pick the restaurant, that probably won't happen in May or June. We will definitely want to say where we are going.
This was a very successful month though we obviously did not do exactly what we set out to do. But we did eat out way less. I also feel like this made us really examine our urges to buy food out, something we were doing with out much thinking before. Certainly money was saved as well, which was one of the main points.
What I did: I allowed myself to freely say when I wanted to eat out, how I didn't feel like cooking or shopping and then didn't eat out. But at least I didn't pretend I was always happy about it.
You may be wondering: did they eat out more with others to get around this challenge? Nope, that did not happen. Although I was so desperate to see my friend and eat Indian food on Tuesday I made phone jokes in a bad Indian accent to get her appetite up.
So onto the May challenge! Since both of us will be going out of town at different times where a lot of eating out will occur I wonder if that will make things easier.
First a rule I don't think I shared. We only agreed to limit our eating out with each other. If we were out and the other was not present then the agreement did not exist, although we could certainly curtail our eating out with others. This was because most of the time we eat out together, so just shutting that off would be a lot. Also sometimes it is hard to make other friends agree or understand the weirdness, so it was just a thing between us.
So back to the first month we failed in the strictest sense but did manage to basically change our habits so in that sense we won.
When we ate out:
-the weekend we closed on the cottage. Take out one evening and breakfast out. It was so incredibly stressful in other ways, and we didn't have running water which made cooking very challenging, well we gave ourselves a by.
-appetizer and drinks while out celebrating a good friend's recent homeopathic school [4 years] graduation. There was no way we were going to be there, so we compromised.
-gave in and bought a burrito one evening, in order to limit impact we shared it.
-breakfast up north while at the cottage, you know cause we had no water and we want to support local businesses and...we so caved.
We also ate out with friends on April 30 for Dining for Life. This was our planned treat. It was nice of us to let someone else pick the restaurant, that probably won't happen in May or June. We will definitely want to say where we are going.
This was a very successful month though we obviously did not do exactly what we set out to do. But we did eat out way less. I also feel like this made us really examine our urges to buy food out, something we were doing with out much thinking before. Certainly money was saved as well, which was one of the main points.
What I did: I allowed myself to freely say when I wanted to eat out, how I didn't feel like cooking or shopping and then didn't eat out. But at least I didn't pretend I was always happy about it.
You may be wondering: did they eat out more with others to get around this challenge? Nope, that did not happen. Although I was so desperate to see my friend and eat Indian food on Tuesday I made phone jokes in a bad Indian accent to get her appetite up.
So onto the May challenge! Since both of us will be going out of town at different times where a lot of eating out will occur I wonder if that will make things easier.
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