Tiffany LaFountain

Since I don't usually buy much aside from food right now, for consumerism week, I decided to try to avoid eating out for a week and avoid buying snacks for convenience. I had to plan a little bit better for groceries, but ended up only purchasing a nutrition bar. I'm not sure how many snacks I get on a weekly average, but I would guess that during a busy term of school, I grab a snack and a sparkling water around three times a week. I also didn't make any orders online or purchase any items (aside from food) in store, but I don't think that's something I usually do weekly.

For the week focused on water, I involved a portion of my eco-change project: planting native. I chose to plant a snowberry bush, two Oregon grapes, two western sword ferns, and two spreading rush starts. I planted these in my rain garden, and they should all need minimal to no additional watering.

Transportation week: For the week focused on transportation, I made sure to take the max to work at any opportunity I had. Of the four days I worked, I took the max to work 3 times and went home carpooling with my neighbor. This is something we've done before, but we both recently got out of the habit of carpooling/ taking the max for convenience. As much as this did take a little more time, I did spend more time walking and knitting on the days I took public transit.

To focus on reducing energy use, I decided to switch to only running laundry loads with cold water. This isn't something I thought of as an energy saver before, so I usually chose the warm setting. This change has made no negative difference in my life for the past couple of weeks, and it's been easy to implement. I'm glad this was a suggestion for an action on the ecochallenge website, otherwise I wouldn't have thought to make the change.

I've been making a point to eat vegan breakfasts every day this past week (usually I eat eggs and cheese). Instead, I've been eating cream of wheat with a vegan protein powder (truvani), chia seeds, and blueberries. Normally I have them with chocolate chips as well, but I've been skipping on those to make it vegan. For lunch, I've usually been having beans with rice (to make it a full protein) and broccolini on the side. This change has actually been pretty easy to make happen. Usually, I don't think about centering my meals around meat anyway, so it's not a major change to make sure most of them are meat-free.

This week, I made a pretty big change for myself. I've been primarily dependent on drinking Celsius for my source of energy for years now. Not only do I worry about how this impacts my health, but it also contributes to unnecessary waste (7 cans a week). This week, I started making cold brew coffee with a press I already have at home. I definitely notice a difference. With coffee, I feel jittery without real lasting energy throughout the day, but I think L-theanine is the ingredient in Celsius that helps prevent that. I'll try to integrate that supplement to make the transition easier. Other than that, the switch has been surprisingly simple. I'm not craving it as much as when I tried to stop without replacing it with another source of caffeine. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to phase out caffeine from my daily routine.