My progress on the Shangri-la diet

As promised, a spreadsheet chronicling my progress on the Shangri-la diet.

I noted a while ago that the Shangri-la diet might be making my stomach lighter, but it was keeping my wallet heavier. My weekday lunches were costing me substantially less than they had been before the diet began. I expected the same would hold true for my weekly grocery shopping. Well, the figures are in, and they are slightly unexpected:

The amount I have spent on groceries is in the middle of the range of the amount I usually spend on groceries. There has been no observable change.

My grocery shopping bill changes from month to month, so its hard to tell exactly what is happening in a given month. Possibly I have had an expensive month, but because the diet is cutting my bills, it only looks like an average month. This thought is supported by the fact my recent bills have been well below average: I have a couple of particularly high grocery bills at the beginning of the month. We'll see what happens next month.

I also notice that I haven't visited a cash machine once during the month of January. In a normal month, I seem to spend about £100 in cash. Also in a normal month my cash spending and grocery spending seem to add up to a figure which stays fairly constant from month to month. So in January, my total groceries + cash purchases have fallen by £100. Not an amount of money to sneeze at!

Why have my cash purchases fallen? Before starting the diet, I bought my lunch with cash. This meant I always had cash on hand - and that if I didn't, I would ask the cashpoint fairy to give me more. Now, my lunch money has moved onto the weekly grocery bill, and I have less incentive to leave my warm, cozy, office and brave the cruel Cambridge weather to refill my wallet. Which means anything else I would buy during the week (I often pop into a Co-op on my way home from work) is now on my debit card - hence included in my groceries bill.