One of the struggles in my mind as regards eating is my frugality, my waistline, and my appetite.

Most of the foods that I enjoy eating are neither frugal nor low-fat and/or low-calorie. Pizza, for instance. The way I prepare it (which is the best that I’ve ever eaten, in or out of a restaurant), is fairly expensive. It’s cheaper than going out to eat, but not by much. One pizza which feeds our family costs about $10 in ingredients. It also uses one pound of mozzarella by itself, plus pepperoni and Italian sausage. We use mushrooms and spinach as well, but those are healthy so don’t count in this discussion (plus the amount we use is probably negligible for the calorie count, and they are the cheapest of the ingredients by weight of volume as well). All sweets fall into this category as well. Even if they’re very cheap, they’re unhealthy and unnecessary.

But I try to be frugal (as much as my husband allows), so when it comes to left-overs, I hate to throw things out. So I eat them. But they add up too! I’m trying to get it in my mind that it’s just as wasteful to throw something into my mouth unnecessarily as it is to throw something into the garbage can. If I don’t need it, then it’s wasteful and “waist-full”!!

So, the few bites of peanut butter and jelly sandwich that my kids didn’t eat can either be saved for later (and they probably wouldn’t eat it because it would be mushy), I can eat it, or I can toss it. Usually I eat it so it’s not “wasteful” (my dad was full-blooded Dutch, so I’m frugal by nature as well as “nurture” — we didn’t have enough money growing up to be wasteful)… but it’s still wasteful to eat that which I don’t need. And it’s probably worse, because it’s unhealthy for me. Even if the actual food isn’t just loaded down with fat and calories and artificial ingredients, it still contributes to me carrying around at least 30 extra pounds that I ought not have.

So my new motto needs to be “Let the garbage can eat it!!”