Member-only story
My Frugal Lifestyle Made Me Shed 15 Pounds Without Even Trying
Here’s how.
Beginning in my mid-teens and lasting through my first few months out of college, my weight fluctuated dramatically. Partially because I’d gotten in the habit of either shopping my feelings or overindulging on junk food whenever life got stressful. And since I had enough money coming in during those years to get by without paying too much attention to where all of it was going, I failed to appreciate just how problematic yet deeply engrained of a habit it had become. Oddly enough, I viewed my weight as a completely separate issue for which I assumed I’d never find a lasting fix.
It wasn’t until I found myself in a toxic job right out of school that I realized I had a massive consumption problem and needed to make some major adjustments to my spending habits if I ever wanted to be able to quit. While I was able a find a new job rather quickly, my assumption that leaving the old job meant earning significantly less, turned out to be 100% correct. In fact, the new job effectively cut my paycheck in half.
While my original plan was just to cut back for a few months as I adjusted to my new budget and built up an emergency fund, I never ended up going back to my old ways of spending and instead saved more and more with each passing month. And in the process of cutting the fat from…
