Day One

Day 1 of the £1.50 challenge is pretty much over - just allowed one more bowl of porridge, which I will have a bit later. It's not been too bad - just felt a bit hungry during the afternoon. The hardest thing has probably been just not getting up and going to have a biscuit, or making some toast mid afternoon. Also drinking hot water from lunch time - no decaf coffee, no tea bags, and not enough milk to keep drinking coffee all day long. Also missing not having fruit and yogurt.

So what did we get for our £1.50 today?

Breakfast was porridge made without milk.

I had 4 cups of coffee throughout the morning.

Lunch was 2 slices of toast with peanut butter.

Then this evening it was a rice, beans, sweet corn, carrot, leek and broccoli meal (plus a couple of stock cubes between us).

Then tonight I will have another bowl of porridge made without milk.

Those of you who know me will know that I never shy away from the opportunity to use a spreadsheet. With such a limited range of foods for the whole week this is the ideal opportunity to create a simple spreadsheet to track the nutritional value of what we're eating, and compare this with the recommended values.

Energy ...1193 kCal ... 48 % of RDA
Fat ... 30g ... 32 % of RDA
Carbohydrate ...168g ... 56 % of RDA
Fibre ... 28g ...157% of RDA
Protein ... 49g ... 89 % of RDA
Salt ... 5g ... 66% of max RDA

So well down on everything apart from fibre. It will be interesting to see what kind of affect this will have over a few days - but obviously if these were the figures long term this kind of diet would begin to have an impact on health.

Looking forward to that porridge!