Fake ice cream is not delicious.

I was at the grocery store earlier this afternoon. I went to buy some parchment paper, because I’ve decided to follow Michael Pollan’s decree: “Eat all the junk food you want, as long as you make it yourself.”

I took my parchment paper, and pecans, and two boxes of free-after-coupon cereal, and went to the cashier. And ahead of me, there was a guy with four tubs of Breyers. He was really excited about the deal he was getting.

“Two litres of ice cream for only two dollars!” he said to the cashier. “I couldn’t believe my eyes!”

Indeed, he shouldn’t have believed his eyes. What he was buying wasn’t ice cream – it was frozen dessert.

This may not mean anything to you. It didn’t mean anything to me, either, until a survey company called me a couple of weeks ago to ask my opinion on supermarkets putting frozen dessert next to ice cream.

“Would it surprise you,” they asked, “to find out that frozen dessert was actually an edible oil product?”

Yes, it did. Also, it grossed me out.

(This isn’t true in other countries. “Frozen dessert” can be a catchphrase for ice cream, gelato, sorbet, etc. But in Canada, it means that the thing doesn’t meet the legal requirements for ice cream. Which, ew.)

I didn’t tell the guy in front of me what he was buying. I decided that it wasn’t my responsibility to make other people read the ingredients.

This is a pretty good illustration of the problem of cheap, come to think of it. Cheap doesn’t care about value, just about price. Cheap doesn’t check to see what they’re consuming – whether it’s made from oil, or sewn in a sweatshop in Thailand, or grown on a factory farm. Cheap just wants to spend as little money as possible.

And Cheap gets what they pay for. In this case, a carton of emulsified, frozen corn oil. Strawberry-flavoured.

I’ve got a lot of side hustles. I sell stuff on Amazon, Craigslist and eBay. I complete surveys for Ipsos-Reid. And I participate in various university studies.

I’ve been doing stuff on and off for a nutrition genetics study for the last four years. They keep calling me back and asking me to do more stuff, and then they pay me, and I pay down more of my student loan.

Everyone wins. (Except when they wanted me to taste the bitterest of all bitter liquids, in which case my tastebuds lost. I still have no idea what that was. ETA: It was phenylthiocarbamide.)

Anyway, I’m writing this post because a month ago they asked me to come back and do another part of the study, and it involved taking my height and weight.

I was shocked at the results.

I’m the same height I’ve been since I was 18, but I am… not so much the same weight.

In fact, over the last year and a half, I’ve put on 20 pounds.

And I know why.

It’s a combination of my Starbucks habit, chemistry class, and taking transit.

I find chem really difficult, but I’ve had to take a lot of chemistry classes for my current degree. So I leave at the last possible minute – thus making it necessary to take transit instead of biking – and on the way in, I stop at one of the campus Starbucks’ for a peppermint mocha (which the Starbucks website tells me has 210 calories) and a piece of banana bread (a whopping 490 calories – 30% from fat).

That way, at least I have something to look forward to.

Writing it out this way makes the problems obvious, but I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing. Not until I had to stop and think about where that extra 20 pounds had come from.

So now I’m avoiding Starbucks like the plague. I’ve been waking up earlier and making breakfast (usually steel-cut oatmeal), and making my own, significantly healthier, mocha to take with me to class. Since it’s November, I don’t particularly want to break out my bike again, but I’m trying to get out one subway stop early and walk part of the way to class.

I haven’t weighed myself yet, but my clothes fit better, and there’s more cash in my bank account. Not only were those morning stops wrecking my waistline, they were putting a serious ding in my food budget.

More than anything, figuring out this particular problem has reminded me how insidious bad spending (and eating!) habits can be. It took until someone else said my weight out loud for me to realize there was a problem – even though I’d bought clothes over the last year and noticed that I’d gone up a size; even though I record everything I spend and balance my spending against a digital register daily. I’d been completely blocking it out.

I’ve got another early-morning chem class next semester. This time ‘round, I’m going to work hard at making it more enjoyable (dirty mnemonics!) and I’ll be careful not to sabotage my health or my finances because of it. Fingers crossed.