Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap fears for his waistline

Remember that there are two parts to the equation.

Just adjust your caloric burning accordingly. This will give you a great excuse for doing nothing but sitting around all day while the future misses takes care of everything.

There's very little fat in that lot.

A recipe for hunger pangs I think. Good luck with that.

I used to live with a quid a day

In 1994. As a student in a camp working in the fields or packing food, somewhere near Norwich. I spent 7 pounds per week for groceries for about three months.

I remember buying 7 big bars of Mars for 1 pound, the beans tins were 20 pennies or less, and of course a lot of spaghetti.

Breakfast was cooked in the camp, but 7 pounds was enough for lunch and dinner, while doing heavy manual labour - stacking pallets with 18 kilos frozen strawberry boxes.

During my last month there I went up to 10 pounds per week and was feeling like a king.

Now I definitely won't be able to live on a diet of Mars and spaghetti :) I have been to England a couple of times since, but I don't remember groceries prices. If like here across the pond in the Big North, probably 10 times what were in 1994.

Was in tesco the other day (which is by no means cheap) but noticed dried chickpeas were circa £1.50 / kg whereas tinned were along the lines of 60p / tin wet, I'm guessing the dry ones were pushing an order of magnitude cheaper.

Live Long and Prosper

A restricted calorie diet can make you live longer (if you are a mouse)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3958810

From the abstract

group 1) a nonpurified diet ad libitum (all you can eat when you want it)

group 6) 40 kcal/wk of the diet fed to groups 3 and 4 (approximately 65% restriction)

Mice from group 6 lived longest of all.

The longest lived 10% of mice from group 6 averaged 53.0 mo which, to our knowledge, exceeds reported values for any mice of any strain.

Beneficial influences on tumor patterns and on declines with age in T-lymphocyte proliferation were most striking in group 6.

Significant positive correlations between adult body weight and longevity occurred in groups 3-5 suggesting that increased metabolic efficiency may be related to longevity in restricted mice.

Mice from groups 3-6 ate approximately 30% more calories per gram of mouse over the life span than did mice from group 2.

These findings show the profound anti-aging effects of dietary restriction and provide new information for optimizing restriction regimes.

At least...

I hope those numbers are tasty, when you crunch them...

I remember the days of old when we had Kwik Save in the UK (bought up by somerfields?). As a very young person, 12 or 13 I think, I would work on the tills. I would spend the majority of my time on a Saturday scanning tins of tomatoes and beans that cost about 5 pence each or something close.

It was all the No-Frills, Kwik Save own brand stuff. The owner of a local transport cafe would come in each week and completely buy up all the beans, tomatoes, milk, bread and butter he could find which lead to a a maximum number of purchases per customer.

You can eat surprisingly well on £1 a day. £1.50 and you have a feast. You just can't do it by buying fresh food to cook everyday. My meals (usually a lovely chicken Rogan Josh or Jalfrezi) cost about 60p but only because I cook a huge pot in one go and eat it in portions with a generous helping of rice. Unless you insist on some variety of rice which has been lovely tended by virgins and harvested under a full moon from Waitflower or The Cooperators, is dirt cheap. A substantial helping will cost less than 10p per meal and will easily ward off the hunger pangs. Potatoes are out because their weight means the transport costs make them expensive by comparison.

Not surprisingly, the protein is the single most expensive ingredient of my food. Iceland do a kilo of chicken breasts for about £4 and often do a 2-4-1. For me a kilo of chicken creates about 10 meals so that's 40p/meal. If I catch the 2-4-1 that's just 20p for the protein. A tin of chick peas, a couple of tins of tomatoes (the co-op do 4 tins of Italian chopped tomatoes for 70p) and an onion plus a jar of the curry paste and you can easily create a good, filling and tasty meal for 60p. That leaves 40p for some luxury items. Stay away from milk products because they are, bizarrely given the amount that's wasted, quite expensive.

If you are a labourer and into a brutal exercise regime then give it up if you want to eat for £1 day. If you are not, then there no need to eat three square meals a day and you can't burn the candles at both ends. We're conditioned to eat too much. Doctors blame sugary drinks or fast foods or tv meals for the impending obesity epidemic but I think we've just been told to eat too much of everything (including fruit). I eat one meal a day and have done so for over 10 years. I don't eat fruit except occasionally. I weigh 84kg and have done for 20 years so I'm not even eating into my fat reserves (which are more than adequate). Nor do I have rickets or some other disease from eating too little fruit and not enough vegetables.

Eating frugally while watching a supermarket ad for a lovely roast joint is a challenge so you have to learn to tune it out. I'm not recommending this to anyone (let alone everyone) but eating on a £1 a day is doable. However, it necessary to wean yourself off western eating habits and I suspect this is the hardest part. These habits seem to come less from our needs and more from the needs of Mr Kellogg, his friends Mr Proctor and Mr Gamble, their friends the Lever brothers and likes of their military friend General Mills. Plus a cadre of lazy assed health professionals who spout what we should eat (seven portions of fruit a day?) without any real evidence because the studies required would not be ethical.