I just recently came to the idea that I need less “stuff”, your blog is going to become a favorite

I don’t know what country you are from, but unless you live under a bridge and pay no rent, you will spend at least 30-40% for rent on a modest place and I am basing that on the average wage where I live, which is about $17.00 an hour. Most make less. In rent alone I’ve wiped out more income than you plan to live on. Want a family? Not possible on your budget. CPS would take your kids if you tried to deny them by saving so much.

Good luck. I think you’ll need it.

I’m excited to read the rest of this blog to get some more tips for budget stretching.

If we don’t have cheap oil like today, you may not be able to only spend $75/m/p on healthy food, which is only 15% of your spending. We buy organic when make sense (say apple, peach, berries) and local fresh produce as much as possible, but those also cost much more than those shipped from far away (sounds strange, isn’t it, it is oil …).

Have you given some thoughts on how much % wise people should spend on food that makes sense and support local farmers on the long term, rather just buy on specials?

Breakfast was coffee at work and maybe someones scraps. That was about $50 a month, and I would buy milk too on the off-cycle month where I am only buying pork chops.

Now, I spend much more and I wonder wth!

I certainly wasn’t happy eating the same thing nightly, and I was alone back then too, and extremely poor, so maybe it was easier to cope with at the time.

Now I am “poor” by choice, to ERE. A noble cause.

make a zesty and smooth sauce, without cooking from whole nuts like cashews or almonds, a little water, and onions and garlic or other ingredients like parsley and cilantro.

make nut butter in small batches

make flour from whole grains or beans (if you have the dry ingredients container/blade, and maybe it does ok with this even with the standard wet ingredients container/blade

make smooth pancake batter from raw unsoaked rice and beans

liquify raw root vegetables for addition to soups that you are making.

instantly make a vegetable soup base from a vaporized stalk of celery, a half a carrot, a slice or two of onion, and an unpeeled clove of garlic and water.

I bought it for the green smoothies, but it does a lot of super handy stuff for me now that I own it.

I am not currently doing the warrior diet in any conscious way. I did do it for a couple months in the summer of 2007 or fall of 2007. I learned a lot about my actual needs for food and also increased my willpower around eating food (specifically, being able to decide NOT to eat or to defer a meal rather than just going limp and having to eat, wherever I happen to be). It has also changed my pattern around my main meal, which I still have as the evening meal. I tend to start it out with the “less aggressive” foods like salads, a green shake, and then proceed on to more aggressive foods like meat or grains and beans. I don’t have a HUGE evening meal though, mainly because I am not really active enough to need it and am usually not ravenous even at the end of the day. I just eat until I am satisfied, then stop. Having a big salad or green shake at the beginning fills up a good part of my stomach, too, so the rest of the meal can be smaller.

I am also not a complete raw foods person except that I include a larger than average raw food component to my daily diet, mainly due to the green shakes. I find I really don’t eat as much collard greens, kale, cabbage, or lettuce as I would like, or as consistently as I would like, except when I am drinking the shakes. Plus I am fairly convinced that blending the greens up to smithereens increases the nutritional effectiveness.

the vitamix has a 2HP power output level, so it just blends things a lot more thoroughly than a standard blender can, using less water (or in some cases no water, if you use the tamper actively and push the food into the blades with it) and it won’t bog down. The word “blender” doesn’t do it justice because it is so far beyond any blender most people have experienced. The maximum speed of the blade tips on it is something like 285 miles per hour, for example. You know those thick broccoli stalks? Well, I used to occasionally skin them, slice them up fine and sautee them so as not to waste them.

Well, now I can take one or two inch chunks of broccoli stalk, add them to the blender with a small amount of water, and it comes out like baby food in about 7 seconds.

Butternut squash? I put 1 or 2 inch chunks of raw butternut squash into my smoothies sometimes now. The same would work for yams, carrots, whatever.

I am told you can turn a raw yam into puree with it without any water, but I haven’t personally tried that yet.

The raw fooders and Vitamix people make a big to do about “breaking down all the cell walls to release the nutrients without cooking” which I think is logically valid. Not ALL the cell walls will be broken, but many many more of them are than in a normal blender.

Looking at nutrient the mechanisms of nutrient absorbtion and how the decreasing the particle size of the food you eat increases the total surface area of food directly exposed to digestive enzymes and acids and microscopic gut bacteria, it makes sense to me that blending the food to this high level is going to increase the effective nutritional value of the food you eat, at least to some degree. And with vegetable foods that have relatively tough cell walls this becomes more relevant.

On the personal/experiential side, I have noticed that my health is more resilient and that I have fewer food cravings since I have restarted drinking my green shakes (now that I have the VitaMix). I have a theory that many of us have background micronutritient deficiencies because of the relatively small amount of green veggies we eat and that drinking these shakes corrects some of that. As a result, the food cravings of your body asking to eat *more* food slows down, because those nutrient needs are being satisfied by the shakes.

You do not need a vitamix to do the green shakes. But I think once you have one you won’t want to go back because having one is really the only way available to prepare food exactly this way. Plus it’s like having a Kuhn-Rikon pressure cooker as compared to having a 50s Presto pressure cooker.

BTW, I measured the power need of the VitaMix using my Kill-A-Watt power meter and it measured at 384 watts when it is set on high and blending water. However, keep in mind that the longest continuous use I have ever made of it is about 25 seconds (and that was overkill), so the total power usage is very small.

@steve – Specifically what can a vitamix do that a regular blender can’t? Are you doing the warrior diet with a raw food restriction?

the “green shake” or “green smoothie” is something I first got introduced to when I was exploring raw foods. Basically it’s a way to easily eat a BUNCH of the dark green veggies like kale, collards, broccoli, etc. in a more easily-assimilated form that is very tasty. Basically you are outsourcing the chewing of these dark leafy greens to your blender. I don’t always drink them every day, but I do have them several times a week. I have increased my vegetable intake quite a bit from drinking these, and I think my health is better for it.

The general formula is: some dark green leafy veggies or light green leafy veggies, some fruit to sweeten it, and some water as a blending medium. Parsley is a nice addition and makes it taste really really fresh.

Basically, here is an example of a green smoothie recipe.
1/2 of a banana, cut into 1′ chunks

1/2 of a seeded pear or apple, cut into chunks. (apple seeds are a no-no, I think pear seeds would be fine but I just core the seeds out generally)

1/2 of an avocado
a handful of kale leaves or collard leaves
(destemmed). Chop them up a little if you are using a standard blender. (Instead of kale, you could also try a little bit of cabbage, or some spinach. kale and collards are my mainstays because of their nutritional profiles. Broccoli crowns are nice but are a little more bitter than the kale or collards)

a couple sprigs of parsley

8 oz of water. More if you need it for blending.

Put all this in your blender and blend it for about a minute. If you have a standard blender you may need to stop it and mush the ingredients down with a wooden spoon, then blend again. You can add a little more water, but don’t get carried away or you will dilute the greens and veggies.

Drink! I think it’s really yummy.

I put no more than 1 full piece of fruit (or 2 1/2 pieces of fruit) it one of these because I think more makes it too sweet. The avocado makes a more filling shake and I don’t always put it in.

If you like drinking these and how these make you feel, you may decide to upgrade your blender to a VitaMix. But really, just use your regular blender and give it a try for a few months. I often have one of these as my entire breakfast, or at the end of the day or before dinner.

Of course, now I have a vitamix blender so I can add things like whole carrots and two-inch sections of broccoli stems, and I don’t destem my kale or collard greens at all, and it still comes out like a smoothie, but when I started it was just with a regular blender and destemmed the ingredients and it worked pretty good.

Any raw foods cookbook will give you other ideas for the smoothies. But really you can just experiment.

However, it is very easy to become overweight on a vegetarian diet. Several generations of my family are vegetarians (though we’re not vegan) and about 1/3 of them are obese (many fats and most desserts are vegetarian). Will a balanced vegetarian diet promote a healthy weight? Yes, but a balanced non-vegetarian diet will also.

Specifically for the diet … if only I had a dollar for every “you got to eat more”, “you got to eat breakfast”, “how can you live without lunch”, “the best thing is to eat six small meals” … And most people don’t know why they have these ideas. It’s just handed down and accepted that this is the way the world is. Like so many other things.