Editor’s Note: Deb Heinrich, Gov. Dannel Malloy’s liaison to the state’s nonprofit community, agreed to take the SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge this month and live on $4 a day for food for a week. We are posting her experience in this blog over the next few days.
Today is the first day that I have really felt very, very hungry.
I started the day with my obligatory bowl of oatmeal with a tablespoon of brown sugar. At about 11a.m., I started longing for lunch and feeling a bit tired. For lunch, I had an apple dipped in about three tablespoons of peanut butter. I chose a red delicious apple because I recently read an article that said the skin in a red delicious apple has more vitamins in it than any other apple variety. It filled me up at the time, but at about 3:00 pm, I got really, really hungry.
I felt quite sleepy in a meeting this afternoon and my stomach hurt.
My kids called to ask me if they could have friends over this evening and I felt so tired that I just had to say no.
I had to break down and have a bowl of beans and rice with salsa at 3:30 p.m. I am glad that I cooked it in advance so that all I had to do was heat it up. I’m not sure I could have waited much longer to actually get home and cook something from scratch.
I felt a lot better afterward, more focused, not as grumpy. I’ll have to see how eating this extra meal will fit into the weekly plan. I know I’ll need to eat again this evening. I have to give a keynote address tonight at 6:30 p.m. After that, I’ll have a bowl of leftover lentil soup.
I think I need to analyze the nutrients that I’m taking in. Perhaps there is something specific that I am missing. Once I figure out what it is, I hope I can meet that need for under $2.58. That is all I had left after my grocery trip at the beginning of the week.
