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Year of (Almost) No Fast Food: July Update

I'm pretty sure no one reads this blog, so it won't be a surprise to anyone that it's taken me longer to do an update than I meant it to. But I do kind of want to check in at least monthly to see how my year of no fast food is going.

Right now I'd say it's going...okay. I did really well the month of June. I think I ate fast food on six occasions:

1. Right before my sister's play, which was allowed because it was date night but we were late.
2. The night before Father's Day, because that's where my father-in-law wanted to go for dinner.
3. & 4. Brent and the boys brought me lunch twice.
5. While visiting my sister-in-law and looking at her new house, we bought everyone lunch.
6. On the way to my parents' house, we got food because I'd just had surgery and couldn't cook.

The last week of June, I made an appointment with a surgeon to talk about my pesky gallbladder. It hasn't been giving me a ton of grief, but since Felix was born this year we were pretty much at our deductible and I know that gallstones don't really go away so it seemed like I should probably get it taken care of before it became an emergency situation. I still did notice that telltale ache every time I ate too much fatty stuff or really too much anything.

So I met with the surgeon on Monday, thinking they'd give me an option of getting it removed in a few weeks, and was surprised when they said, "We have an opening this Friday! How about Friday!" It was right before the 4th of July, which meant that I'd already have one day off so I wouldn't have to use as much sick time (which I have scarcely any of because of that adorable six-month-old baby!), so I decided to do it.

Randomly throwing surgery into your life isn't always the most conducive to keeping your house clean or meeting all your life goals, but it turns out it was important. The stone in my gallbladder had grown to about golfball size, and was almost completely blocking my bile duct. Afterwards, the surgeon told us that I actually had a condition called hydrops, where the gallbladder doesn't actually have any bile in it. The surgical team was astounded that this was an outpatient surgery, because usually people with gallbladders that look like mine were patients that had been admitted to the hospital and are in serious pain. My only explanation is priesthood blessings.

With that pesky gallbladder removed, we went up north to recover at my parents' house. It was lovely, and then we came home and tried to go back to real life but all got colds. So then we took a few more days of not real life, and I was back to work on Monday.

Since then, it's been a balancing act of trying to reclaim our yard from weeks of neglect, trying to leave the house because our small window air conditioner is not winning its battle against this very hot summer, trying to cook real meals, but also trying to recover from all of our various ailments. I wouldn't say I fell off the wagon, but I may have dangled a bit. I'm trying to get back into it.

I will say that in the month of June we spent $200 less on food than we did in May, and that's even with buying a Blue Apron box about every week. I'd still like to see our fast food budget decrease even more, but it's a good start.

Well, this was a boring, update-y post, but accountability! Maybe next month I'll be able to talk about how cutting down fast food helped us pay off debt faster. Or buy a new ceiling fan. We'll see.

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