The Cost of Moving: Going Full Huel
If you are planning a cross-country move, and if all your dishes are currently packed away and/or stacked in bankers boxes until you can take them to a team of affordable shipping professionals, you could do the thing where you order takeout every night.
You could also do the thing where you still try to cook meals every day even though your kitchen is filled with boxes that you have to navigate around every time you want to refill your aluminum water bottle.
Or you could go full Huel, which is what I’ve been doing ever since I got back from that first visit to Cedar Rapids.
“Full Huel,” in this case, means eating Huel for every meal. (Or drinking it. Consuming Huel is like consuming a milkshake, which is halfway between eating and drinking.)
You might remember that before I left for Cedar Rapids, I shared a photo of my empty refrigerator; that was partially due to meal planning, but it was also because I knew that when I came back and started packing up my apartment, I would also start drinking Huel exclusively.
I will tell you right now that this is saving my butt.
I am doing the thing where you’re supposed to leave one room of your home as a sanctuary while you pack up the rest of it, and since my home doesn’t have a lot of rooms my sanctuary is really just my bed (which is still my bed until I transfer ownership on Dec 1), which means that the kind of food you can consume from the type of handheld container that I am not going to call an adult sippy cup is way better than getting pizza crumbs or soup spills all over the one part of my apartment that’s still clean.
It’s also way healthier. Huel is nutritionally balanced and heavy on the protein, and it’s also extremely satiating; I don’t end the meal wanting snacks or sweets or more food, and I don’t spend the whole day thinking about what I’m going to eat next.
Which means less time in the kitchen, fewer items that need to be washed or cleaned up, no additional grocery or takeout expenses, and more time spent packing, prepping, podcasting, freelancing, doing Space Time shows, and helping to plan Friendsgiving.
Since this is The Billfold, I’ll let you know that I spent $109.30 on this month’s Huel and $132.87 on all other groceries/toiletries for the month, and most of that was toiletries and moving-related stuff like “the biggest size of garbage bags.” (I’ll spend another $20 this afternoon getting a few more Friendsgiving food items.) Yes, I spent $102.52 on restaurants while I was in Cedar Rapids, mostly because my Huel shipment was delayed and I wasn’t able to shove a bag of Huel into my suitcase, but at least I’m not spending money on restaurants now.
But I will have enough leftover Huel to put in my suitcase when I leave Seattle next week—which means I won’t have to buy takeout for those first few days in the new apartment, either.
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