46 Days of Living Below The Line

Robbie Firmin, one of our fab supporters recently took the Live Below The Line challenge, spending just £1 a day on food for the whole of Lent. Read about why and how he decided to do this.

We’ve certainly been inspired by Robbie and his incredible will power.

For the 46 days of Lent that has just come and gone I set out to live on £1 a day. That is to say my food budget for the duration of Lent was £46.

Why do this?

There were so many reasons to do it, it seemed silly not to!

1. To help raise awareness in the public realm of the reality of hunger and poverty around the world.
2. To cultivate a greater appreciation within myself of the plight of the poor by voluntarily putting myself through an experience of ‘minor poverty’.
3. A creative and quirky way of raising money for a good charity (World Vision UK) who work towards alleviating world poverty and hunger around the world.
4. Will-power is like a muscle – it grows with use. As I have terrible will-power I thought that this would be a good challenge to help me develop my will power.
5. An effective way of losing weight or at the very least kick-starting a generally healthier lifestyle.
6. A lot of people in this country who are in difficult financial circumstances deal with it in very bad ways. E.g. taking out toxic loans, gambling, ignoring the problem. This is a dramatic demonstration of how it is possible to adopt a frugal lifestyle and get on with life even on a shoe-string budget.
7. A visible, creative, credible and memorable way of telling my friends and colleagues that I am a Christian. They would ask; “What are you doing this for?” “I’m doing this to raise money for a Christian charity…” and lots of God-chats would follow on from that!

How does one go about doing this? Any tips?

Plan! Don’t go into this without having a good idea about what you can get for £1 a day. The way I went about it was to do some reconnaissance at supermarkets. I would note down what cost and quantities were associated with certain items and so I could then determine how much a portion was (e.g. in weight) and how much that portion cost. I was then able to plan out what I was going to eat every day, keep the total under £1 on average and make sure that I didn’t go hungry whilst still getting roughly the right nutritional content (e.g. 5-a-day). A spreadsheet came in very helpful!!!

Prepare yourself for it to be tricky at first. For me, I was almost permanently hungry for the first 4 days as my stomach was shrinking. The other thing to contest with is boredom. I would recommend allowing yourself a small treat now and then (e.g. custard, a few cubes of chocolate); it makes a huge difference to morale.

A typical day’s food would be something like this: Breakfast -Water based porridge with honey and raisins. Snacks – Carrot, apple, banana, hard-boiled egg. Lunch – Cup-a-soup with brown bread or potato with baked beans. Dinner – rice with lentil-curry or pasta with tomato sauce and fish fingers. My personal favourite (a little expensive at 40p though) was egg fried rice with ham hock and mixed frozen veg – very tasty!!

What did I learn? How did it change me?

For the world’s poorest people; eating is just about existing from one day to the next. There is no pleasure in it. For them it’s not 46 days, it’s their whole lives. They are denied that ‘colour’ and pleasure in life that we take for granted.

Contentedness is a funny thing. I spent roughly 10 times less on food but was I 10 times less happy? No. I was slightly less happy but it struck me how much of my spending is not necessary or even proportionate to what I get out of it at the end of the day. I am very aware of this now and I hope that in the long-term, I will be a lot less hesitant about my giving. The frugal, leaner lifestyle is much more attractive to me now.

Living below the Line was a great experience; worth every moment I spent doing it. I would definitely do it again.

If you’re up for challenging yourself to Live Below The Line and have any interesting recipe ideas, be sure to let us know on Facebook and Twitter and join in the discussion with others to support and encourage each other through the challenge!