My husband and I have now been in Oxford for two weeks! We are really enjoying it here and have made improvements to ourselves while being here. We have made these improvements by choice, but the city in which we now live has also forced the changes on us.
Since being here, we are already losing weight and feeling better overall. This is because we have been eating much better and exercising a lot more in England than we were in the United States.
Eating Out
In the United States, it is so easy to eat out if you have a car. You can drive over to the McDonald’s drive-thru and order a meal off the value menu to make you full for around $3.00. Here in the UK, that is completely different. First, we don’t have a car, and the nearest restaurant to us is a Chinese restaurant that is about half a mile down the road. Besides that and some more expensive cafés, all of the “cheap” fast food places such as McDonald’s and KFC are in Oxford’s city centre, a two mile walk away.
McDonald’s in Oxford
I post the word cheap in quotations because fast food here is not nearly as cheap as in the United States. The cheapest item (not including the single serving of carrots) on the McDonald’s Saver Menu (US: Value/Dollar Menu) is a cheeseburger for £1.20. This is equal to about $2.00 in USD which is double what you would pay in the US. Their other menu items are similarly-scaled in price, with a Big Mac (not even the meal) costing about £3.50 ($6.00 USD), and a box of 20-piece chicken nuggets selling for £4.19 ($7.00 USD).
The fact that junk food costs more here is also reflected in the prices of unhealthy foods in the store. Candy, cookies, cakes, and other desserts seem to be more expensive here relative to those in the United States. The opposite seems to be true for healthier foods in the grocery store. Besides the out-of-season fruits and more exotic vegetables, it seems that British fruits and vegetables are much cheaper than their American counterparts. I can buy three red bell peppers for around £0.90 while in the US, I couldn’t find red peppers cheaper than $0.70 a piece anywhere. The difference might not seems large, but it is substantial for our budget here in England.
I think that Europe knows how it should be done. I am glad that unhealthy foods are priced so much higher than healthy ones. It really does help deter me from buying the bad food just because it tastes good. It also helps that sweet things here seem to use different ingredients than in the US, and they taste slightly different (in a weird, dissatisfying way) because of it. The exception to this is their ice cream. I have only had ice cream here and thought “wow, why is US ice cream crappy and this ice cream so amazing?”
Eating In
So, with restaurants being so expensive here, my husband and I have yet to eat out since we’ve moved here. We have been making all our own food, and it has been much healthier than the food we ate in the United States. On a daily basis, we eat double or triple the amount of vegetables in the UK than we did in the US. We like to stir fry a lot of vegetables with some chicken, and with that we eat very well for a relatively cheap price. Below I posted some pictures of our typical meals.
Breaded baked cod, vegetable couscous, and veggies.
Stir fry veggies and chicken with noodles
Chicken and veggies with mashed potatoes
Mexican Food in the United Kingdom
Now that I’ve praised the UK for doing things right, I am going to dole out some criticism for their selection of ingredients for Mexican food. I am from New Mexico, home of Socorro and Hatch, origins of Socorro and Hatch Green Chile. I have always been obsessed with green chile. I can say that it is one of my favorite foods (I could put green chile on most any dinner food). It is the single food item that I miss.
Online, you can buy green chile on Amazon for £60-75 for 24 4oz cans. That’s about $5.00 a can, not including shipping costs. There is also a place called South Devon Chilli Farm that sells green chile (among a lot of other types of peppers from around the world) that they claim are “Hatch Green Chiles,” but they are out of stock until their next crop (next July). In short, it doesn’t look like I will be having chile anytime soon.
We did manage to find tortillas and salsa, so I browned some beef and we had tacos/burritos. I find it interesting that in the three local supermarkets, the only Mexican food they carried was of the Old El Paso brand. And their chunky salsa, sour cream, and guacamole (Old El Paso, of course) all come in short little squeeze bottles. I found this quite interesting. The burritos I made were good, but they were nothing like the Mexican food back in New Mexico.
First “Mexican” meal in the UK
Exercise
Oxford buses in the city centre
Not having a car has been surprisingly easy. Here in Oxford, everything seems to be easy to get to on foot. My husband works and studies two miles from where we live and so he usually walks at least four miles a day. I walk much less, but still have been averaging one to two miles a day. I try to take a walk to the store every day, which is half a mile away. There are days when I do not feel like walking to the store or we don’t need anything from the store, and on those days I have a least walked (or run) the four flights of stairs of our building at least twice. I have already noticed a difference in my endurance. When we got here, it was hard for me to walk a mile or two without getting tired or hurting my legs, but now already in two weeks I can walk the four miles to and from the city centre without a problem (other than sweat — I’m still not used to the humidity here). We have avoided taking the city buses thus far because of money, but we seem to be doing well without them so far.
We both already feel so much better eating more healthy foods and exercising more. My husband suffers from Type I Diabetes and because he has been exercising more and consuming way less sugar in his diet, he uses up his insulin at a little under half the rate here in England than he did in the United States. In addition to this and the weight loss, both of our resting heart rates have fallen to around 60-70 bpm here (they were 90s in the US). I’m sure that we will continue to see the positive effects of these changes we have made in our lives every day that we are here.
