How to Eat Paleo on a Budget

 

 

 

 

Whether you’re a college student, a college dropout like me, or even a college graduate, you’ll find it can be hard to stick to a paleo diet when there’s not much in the bank. But don’t reach for the ramen just because you can’t afford grass-fed beef! There are many ways to eat healthy and save money.

• Invest in filling foods. I find that eating meals high in fat keep me satiated throughout the day. A salad is perfectly paleo, but you might be hungry again soon. Buying foods that will fill you up longer will cut down your snacking and your spending. I recommend ground beef, fatty meat cuts, coconut oil, and nuts.

• Make casseroles, stews, soups, and other nutrient dense meals. And make them big. By buying meats and veggies in bulk, you can create a cheap meal that will feed you several times over and contain protein, vitamins, and fat. I personally love making a chicken bake with carrots, peas, onions, and cheese. Look online for recipes and augment them for your own dietary needs.

• Stop worrying about grass-fed, free range, and organic foods. Yes, they are wonderful, and if you can buy them, then do it. I don’t dispute that these foods are cleaner and better for you, but don’t think all is lost if you buy store-brand eggs. Take what you can when you’re short and splurge when appropriate. I personally go by taste. For me, some foods are worth buying organic because they taste better, like eggs and half and half. But I don’t lose sleep at night because my hamburgers aren’t grass-fed. Again, do what’s right by you, but don’t break the bank.

• Go in with friends for farm-imported foods. If you do want to get the freshest food possible, consider going in with friends for an order and split the shipping costs. Or if there’s a co-op close enough, take turns driving to pick up the goods. This works well for items hard to find in stores like lard.

• Grow your own food. I swear, there’s nothing better than a ripe tomato just picked from your back garden. If you have the space and enough light, try growing your food. Many plants grow well in pots and you can maximize space with hanging planters. I plan to do this soon on my own back porch!

• Check the price per ounce. Most grocery stores these days have the price per ounce on the shelf tag, usually in the upper left hand corner. Pay attention to that while shopping. It can help you determine if it’s worth buying a larger size or going with the store brand.

• Buy in bulk and freeze in single servings. I hate going to the grocery store all the time, so I like to stock up. I buy large bags of vegetables and meat, divide them into single servings in ziplock bags, and freeze. I can pull out food as needed and I don’t waste any food by not eating it before it goes bad. This also works for cooking as well. You can have a big cooking day and then freeze individual portions of what you’ve made. Reheat for instant paleo-friendly meal.

• Buy bone-in meat. Chicken quarters with bones and skin are incredibly cheap. Boneless and skinless breast meat requires more processing, thus costs more. But that works out just fine for paleo eaters; we can take advantage of the cheap fatty meats.

• Save bones and vegetable bits for homemade stock. Chicken, pork, and beef bones can be frozen and saved to make homemade stock. Unwanted parts of vegetables like leafy tops and skins can also be saved to flavor the stock.

• Buy produce in season. Fruits and vegetables will taste better and be cheaper if you buy them in season. Do a quick Google search for in season produce while making a grocery list.

• Have a paleo potluck. Get together with other paleo eaters and have a potluck. You pay for one dish and get a whole meal. It’s also a great way to learn new recipes and cooking techniques. Be sure to check for any allergies among participants.

• Drink water. It’s free at restaurants and cheap at home (unless you have yucky Atlanta chlorine tap water).

• Limit eating out. Eat at home as much as you can. Pack a lunch instead. Fill it with all the yummy nuts, fruits, meats, and cheeses you can’t get at most places. Bring a water bottle to fill up from the water fountain instead of buying water. Suggest friends come over for a home-cooked meal. If you can’t avoid going to a restaurant, eat beforehand and order something small, like coffee or an appetizer.

Blast from the Past: 14 Patty Whopper Challenge

I stumbled across these videos last night. It’s from my senior year when 7 senior boys decided to challenge each other to eat a Whopper with 14 patties on it. And at least 50 people showed up to watch, myself included, to cover it for the school paper. Oh. My. God. Talk about small town, huh?

None of it is edited, so it’s really not worth watching both all the way through. But see if you can spot high school me walking around.

A Few Requests for the Readers

I’d like to get some feedback from my readers. There’s a few ways to do this.

1. Take my readership poll on the left-hand sidebar. I’d like to know who is reading this thing. It only takes a second!
2. Rate my posts. There’s a 5-star rating system at the end of each post. I’d like to know when I’m doing well…and not so well. Also, my top rated posts are automatically updated in my sidebar.
3. Tell me about commenting. Is it a chore to comment on this blog? Is there something I can do to make it easier? I’d like to get some more discussions going in the comments.

Thanks!

Good Art vs Bad Art: An Enlightening Article

I’ve only discovered the Art Renewal Center this morning and I’ve spent the better part of it reading through articles and looking at artworks. (Instead of cleaning up the apartment like I had planned.) There’s still a lot to find, but I really like this article I came across, Good Art, Bad Art: Pulling Back the Curtain. It’s a fairly lengthy article, but I definitely recommend reading it. It explains why art, when it reached the pinnacle of excellence in the late 19th century, was taken over by Modernism and all classic realistic art was condemned. It’s fabulous. Please go read it. Here’s a snippet from the site:

Modern and Post-modern Art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous, vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming bulk of its would-be audience, who can find nothing with which to relate.

It has been called exciting and cutting-edge, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers. Whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black. Whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the Statue of Liberty. The effect is always the same. MEANINGLESS PRIMITIVISM.

Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question, ad nauseum: What is art? What is art? Only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good; all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas all the great art in history, my friends, is ART ABOUT LIFE.

Squee!

Beautiful Pregnancy Photography

You know what? I’m kinda tired of the same old pregnancy package photos. You know the one when the man stands behind the woman and they both cup the belly and look down at it lovingly? That’s nice and all, but I’m in the mood for something different.

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And I hope to be as hip as this if I ever become preggers.

Atlanta Atlas Shrugged Reading Group Survey

I plan to moderate an Atlas Shrugged reading group soon(ish) for the Atlanta Objectivist Society. To gauge interest and to figure out planning details, please take this survey to let me know if you’re interested. Thanks!

My Ever-Evolving View of My Body

Lately I’ve found myself viewing my body in a completely new way. For the first time in my life, when I look at myself in the mirror I don’t automatically think things like “Oh god I’m breaking out” or “I wish I didn’t have that fat there.” I don’t suck in anymore, I don’t imagine myself with more here and less there. These days I’ve become very content with my body and now when I look at myself in the mirror, I admire what I see rather than critique it.

To give some background on this we’ll have to go back to when I first started to really notice my body and compare it to other girls, around 4th grade or so. It was right as puberty was in full swing with my classmates. Bodies were changing, and they weren’t changing all at the same time. I suddenly became more aware of how my own body was and started paying attention to how other girls were built. My first hang up was boobs. I’ve never been more than a B cup, so in middle school when I was first starting to develop, there wasn’t much going on. I desperately wanted to wear bras like the other girls, but I was deathly embarrassed to admit this to my mother. (Which is ironic because she was trying to push me to get into bras at this time. As much as I wanted to accept, I felt some sort of shame in doing so.)

My next big hang up was weight. I was chubbier than a lot of my friends. They were more athletic and quite skinny. I longed to be skinnier like them, to not have to wear double digit sizes and to not come out of a dressing room empty handed. I recall actually being embarrassed because I had to shop in the juniors section while all my friends were still able to fit in to little girls’ sizes. I was about 13 at the time. (It seems so silly now!) Shopping was always a self-esteem wrecker. I would bring piles of clothes into the dressing room and more often than not come out with almost nothing. In dressing room mirrors I came to hate my tummy, thighs, and flat chest.

On top of that, most of the girls I had for friends would viciously make fun of each other and my size was often a topic of their ridicule. Granted, I didn’t think I was fat (there were girls much bigger than me), but I did feel overweight and chubby. Ultimately I felt depressed about how I looked and constantly imagined myself with less fat on my bones.

As I got to high school, I still had hang ups about my breast size and weight, but they lessened. I found better friends I felt better about myself. But still I looked disparagingly on my shape and was jealous of my busty friends. So often I felt less sexy or more little girlish standing next to them. Colorguard was a bit of a double edged sword when it came to my weight. On the one hand, I learned for the first time how to move my body and make it do beautiful things. I came to realize the power and grace I possessed. I also learned how to use make up effectively. But I was also pressured by instructors to watch my diet and try to lose weight for new uniforms that season. (Yay for spandex and body stockings!) But ultimately I began to make steps forward and stopped seeing my looks in such a negative light.

In college I learned how to dress myself better and emphasize my waist and curves. I still compared myself to other girls often, but more in a “Oh, she’s got a cute look. I’d like to try that color combination.” kind of way rather than, “God, I wish I had her figure.” I was also learning more about myself sexually and discovering my own sex appeal, which was previously unknown to me.

I think what’s really brought me to where I am today is the art modeling. All the compliments and paintings of myself are an ego boost, yes, but hearing artists specifically talk about why my curves are such an asset made me look at myself completely different. It was also affirming to see women with my figure portrayed in artworks from the 19th century and earlier. Paintings of goddesses, dancers, nymphs, and divine figures: they all looked like me! I had rarely, if ever, seen someone with my body type (curvy, round stomach, pear shaped, not humongous breasts) shown so beautifully. It makes me wish I had discovered art much earlier.

And it’s all brought me to this point where I no longer hate my fat and I don’t want to lose weight. (At least, not for cosmetic reasons. I do need to get healthier.) Part of that has been getting through the awkward stages of adolescence and becoming more proportioned, but most of it has been evolving my view of myself to a more positive place. I am comfortable in my skin these days. Actually, more than comfortable. I’m flourishing in my body.

Fun Gesture Posing Strategy

When I first started art modeling I did a lot of long poses of somebody else’s choosing. But now as I get more jobs, I’m doing a lot more gesture poses. Gesture drawing is what artists do to loosen up. The poses are short (30 seconds to a few minutes) and allow for more dramatic poses that otherwise couldn’t be held for several hours. The model’s goal is to provide dynamic poses that have different levels, angles, and views of the body. I like gesture poses a lot because I get to set the pose and I don’t have to hold still in one spot forever. But there’s also more responsibility on me to come up with multiple poses on the spot and all of them different and intriguing.

I’ve done well so far, but I find myself doing similar and less athletic poses. I find it difficult to come up with various athletic poses that I can hold. I’ve also never been an athlete, save a few years of marching band and dance, so I feel strange trying to do anything but pretty plies. But I’ve come up with a strategy that might help.

I am going to pretend I’m Spider-Man.

And other people too. I figure if I pick 2 or 3 characters and mimic their movements, it will give me a wide range of poses. It will also help me break past the weirdness of doing poses that I myself have no experience with, because I will be someone else in my head. For example, if I pick the characters Spider-Man, Joan Holloway, and Artemis, I’ll get poses like this:

I’m hoping this will push me to be more creative and also loosen me up. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll let you know how it goes!

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

Thanks to the wonders of antibiotics, I’m feeling much better than I have these past few days. (Ear infection. Ow.) I’m all pepped up, but snowed in, so I’m happily fixing up the apartment and going through my YouTube favorites. Here’s a few videos to spread my cheer.

Happy snow in!

 

Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism Summer Conference

If you’re a college student, undergraduate or graduate, I highly recommend apply to the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism Summer Conference. I attended it last summer and had a blast. I met some great intellectuals like Andrew Bernstein and Eric Daniels who were interesting in class and engaging in lunch conversation. I also met a ton of people my age interested in Ayn Rand. I got little to no sleep during the conference because I was often up till the wee hours of the morning talking about life and ideas. The application isn’t too bad, food and board are covered, and there’s a $5o0 traveling stipend, so the conference is practically free. Please please please sign up!