Click here to get beach-ready abs for $3 a day

Please excuse my Men’s Health cover shot and link bait.  The relevance to six pack abs is tenuous but not non-existent.  Today I’m going to be nerding out a little, and finding the most cost-efficient ways to meet essential nutritional needs.  If we get this right then washboard stomachs will follow.  Obviously.

I talked earlier about my database of nutritional information and food costs.  This database includes the cost of food that anybody can get by walking into the Marina Safeway in San Francisco.  It provides a good baseline estimate of food costs, but in January I’m hoping to reduce costs even further with sales, dumpster diving, and extreme couponing!

Let’s start by establishing some nutritional rules: 

·         2500 calories a day

·         Obtain the majority of calories from unprocessed food

·         Maximize protein consumption (This goal only works at low budgets. At high food budgets it would result in an excessively protein-heavy diet).

·         At least 38g fiber per day

·         At least 15% of calories from fat

·         Achieves USDA recommended daily intake of vitamins A and C, and Calcium and Iron

Mathematically, I have set up an optimization problem that seeks to maximize the protein content of my diet subject to a cost equality constraint (a fixed budget) and several nutritional inequality constraints (for example, the diet must produce at least 100% of the recommended daily intake of fiber, vitamins and minerals).

In other words, for every budget I can find the best diet that satisfies all my nutritional needs.

Rock bottom!

The cheapest diet that meets all my vitamin, fiber, fat and mineral needs is only $1.30 a day.

It consists of:  Oatmeal: 365g;  White Rice: 120g; Margarine: 100g.

Yuck!  And it only provides 52g of protein, only 8% of calories.

Getting more acceptable

For $2 a day I can start buying carrots, meat and no longer have to chow down 100g of margarine.

My $2 diet consists of: Pinto Beans: 1370g; Carrots: 36g; Roasted Ham: 210g; Margarine: 2g.

This diet derives 24% of its calories from protein, 60% from carbohydrate, 15% from fat. It meets or exceeds all vitamin, mineral and fiber needs and is slightly less disgusting than the cheapest diet.

Washboard abs for only $3 a day

At $3 a day, I can start eating slightly more healthily.

Pinto Beans: 207g; Lentils: 445g; Carrots: 33g; Chicken Leg: 267g

This diet gets 33% of calories from protein, 52% from carbs and the remainder from fat. 

All of these “optimal” diets are very monotonous.  My algorithm doesn’t distinguish between different sources of each nutrient so it will find corner solutions by recommending a large portion of the cheapest source of each nutrient.  In the next few days I will add diversity constraints to my optimizer to make things a little more interesting.

So, what did we learn today?

You can eat reasonably healthily for $3 a day. And this $3 diet will lead to muscle gain, fat loss, beach-ready abs, and increased libido. Guaranteed.