What Have I Been Doing?

It has been many months since I last posted.  This is not because of a lack of interest but rather a multitude of life experience that has deepened my commitment to service and broadened my perspective.

Since my last post, I have been part of the founding team of a K-12 school in Atlanta.  The Sudbury School of Atlanta is now open and serving students.  It is a school dedicated to the joy of learning in an enriching environment that respects and trusts students.  The school is based on cooperation rather than competition and is democratically-run.  Students make the majority of the decisions including how money is allocated and even which staff members return year after year.

People may ask, "isn't that a lot of power you give to students?"  Absolutely, because we trust that students are good people.  We don't assume they have bad intentions when they walk through the door.  That is a self-fulfilling prophecy for many schools.  Surround someone with an environment of distrust and most people will act according to the expectations.  Surround someone with an environment of trust and responsibility and you will get trustworthy, responsible students.  For an extreme example of how our environment can negatively affect our behavior, check out the Stanford Prison Experiment.

When you have a school that does not pit students against each other in competition and trusts them with great freedom and responsibility, the result is a school that develops the content of your character.  It empowers students start to finish.  It provides an educational model exactly in line with the outcomes we commonly seek for our society: responsible citizens who are independent thinkers, good decision makers and lifelong learners.  The means and the ends are the same.    

I'm happy to be back writing again and I look forward to sharing new thoughts and new endeavors!

The Cooperative Servant

"I want to throw the whole of my weight (such as it is) in the scales of justice, pure and simple."

-Gandhi

Everyone wants to be a leader.  Everyone wants to feel important.  Everyone wants to be recognized for their efforts.  Martin Luther King called it the "Drum Major Instinct."  It is the idea that if you want to be a leader, you need to find a parade and walk in front of it.  While this is a common paradigm for leadership in America, "trying to become a leader" will not lead you to leadership, nor importance or recognition.  It will also not accomplish the goals of social change you may seek.  Dr. King knew this and taught this his whole life.                

Leadership comes through cooperation, not competition

"Trying to be the leader" puts you in a mode of competition, looking to defeat others.  "My success is dependent upon your failure."  It is a mindset where I cannot walk in front of the parade if you are walking in front of the parade.  Your focus becomes defeating others rather than serving others.  You put your personal success over the success of the group.

So ask yourself, would you follow the vision of a person more invested in their own personal success than the success of the group or the cause?    

No.  Of course not.  So stop trying to be a leader.  Leadership is a process of community.  Leadership is not one person working in their own self-interest.  Leadership is a group working in their own selfless interest.  It is based upon service to others, not personal achievement.  It is based upon humility, not hubris.  It is based upon love, not the need to be loved.  King called it agape.

"Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.  It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it.  Agape is the willingness to go to any length to restore community.  It doesn't stop at the first mile, but goes the second mile to restore community.  It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven times to restore community... He who works against community is working against the whole of creation." 

-Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Stride Toward Freedom"

Do not lead.  Serve and you will be called a leader.  And when you are called a leader, show that person how to serve.

We have to recognize that competition is the default paradigm in America, not cooperation.  Competition is also choice.  We can choose cooperation over competition.  Alfie Kohn's book, "No Contest: The Case Against Competition," argues that cooperation produces superior results not merely for survival, but also in sports, education, human relations and many more areas.  If we base our society on the premise of making someone else lose, we cannot possibly achieve loftier goals like King's dream of being judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.  In competition, we are invested in someone else losing.  So, regardless of the situation, we will replace the defeating color-based bigotry of the past with immigration status, educational achievement, sexual preference, religious identity, political affiliation, or socio-economic status.  And when those are no longer socially acceptable, we will find another label to defeat people because that is the soul of competition.  Defeat, defeat, defeat.  And when we follow this path, there is only one end... defeat.

We must develop a new default paradigm in America: cooperation.  Throw out the idea of "climbing the ladder to success," corporate or otherwise.  It is yet another competitive model like "if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."  These are all competitive models that defeat community.

I propose a new model.  The scales of justice.  And not the impartial balance of a scale with chains.  It is the human scale pictured above at the Shelby Courthouse in Tennessee with the balance of justice firmly placed in human hands.  In one hand, we place the colossal weight of injustice; the unjust systems, laws and structures we have built that demoralize, defeat and dehumanize each other.  On the other side, people actively working toward justice.  It is not enough to have people who simply believe in justice.  Belief without action carries no weight on this scale.  The greater the actions, the greater the weight.  There are no persons to defeat.  There are only people who have not yet enlisted in committing the whole of their being onto the side of justice.

When we cooperate, our goal is to bring people in rather than bring people down.    

But isn't that effort itself competitive against injustice?  There is still a direction we travel, but we travel it together.  There is still a path we follow but we seek progress together.  Justice is created and we create it together.  The inherent worth and dignity of every person stands validated in the struggle for justice.  We must dismantle the unjust systems we have created and replace them with empowering, community-created systems where justice thrives.

Gandhi called it Satyagraha.  The insistence on justice.  The insistence on truth.  It was truth force.  Soul force.  Love in action, as Thich Nhat Hanh titled a book on the subject.  When we create injustice, it is our duty to recognize it and cooperatively restore the incredible, immeasurable and necessary imbalance in the universe known as justice.  It is right-bending of the moral arc.  The moral arc is not impartial, nor is it straight.  It bends toward justice, as King reminded us of the words of the Rev. Theodore Parker.  Our world is governed by love and the outward expression of that is justice.

So who is the leader?  It is the cooperative servant; the gravity that pulls community together in the harmonious orbit of justice.  It is the insistence on love and community so strong that it cannot be broken any more than the earth can stop orbiting the sun.

Choose to put the whole of your weight onto the scales of justice through selfless action with others.  It is the only thing that will tip the scale.  It is the only thing that ever has and everyone will call it leadership.

Leadership is a Process of Community

One of the most paradigm-shifting concepts I teach in leadership is that leadership is a process of community.  Most people come to understand the concept but it does not fit within the traditional American model of leadership.

The traditional model of leadership is that there is a single heroic person that large groups of people follow.  Whatever that person says to do is what the followers do.  It is the classic "find a parade and walk in front of it" model of leadership.  While this model of leadership makes for good movies, when we deconstruct leadership, we will not find a hero at the heart of leadership.  We will find community.

Our greatest leadership challenge today is confronting the reality that our communities have fallen apart and social connections exist mostly online.  We do not know our neighbors.  We eat fast food alone in our cars next to other people eating alone in their cars.  We pay people to care for our children.  We pay people to care for our elders.  We pay people to cook our meals and mow our lawns.  We pay people to educate our children until they are old enough for us to send them away where we pay other people for "higher education," removing our students and their talents completely from our community.

Our communities are now collections of individuals structuring their lives in every way possible to avoid contact with other people.  So what is the result of this in terms of leadership?

Burn out.

I consult with many people who have tried to start something for the social good and burn out because they are "doing all the work."  They are expected to be the hero.  Why is this the most common model now?  Two reasons...

1.  We perceive leadership as someone else's responsibility.
We have culturally lost the concept that leadership is a collective effort.  Martin Luther King, Jr. did not march for freedom and equality alone.  He was the visionary voice for the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of people.  He would have accomplished very little if he did everything alone.

But when our communities are not connecting, there is no substance within which social action can take place.  It is like trying to turn on a lamp with no electricity.  You can flip the switch all you want, but unless there is electricity flowing to the light, nothing will happen.

This is the very reason that our businesses, organizations, schools and government build hierarchical structures.  They try to institutionalize and systematize a proxy for authentic leadership structures because we have lost civic engagement right along with our community connections.  In short:

Hierarchies have become the organizational cast for the broken arm of community.

2.  Our consumer culture tells us we can purchase the answer to any problem.        
We have abdicated our responsibility to solve problems and we try to purchase our way out.  My doctor is responsible for my health, not me.  My nanny is responsible for my kids, not me.  My local school is responsible for educating my child, not me.  My favorite restaurant is responsible for my meals, not me.    

This cultural practice is the reason why entrepreneurship has become the drumbeat of America.  Create market solutions to social problems, which includes everything from acne to saving the environment.  These two cultural views create the perfect storm that destroys the traditional model of leadership and highlights the greatest shortcomings of traditional leadership:

Leadership is powerless without community.  

If everyone thinks leadership is someone else's responsibility, there will be no leadership.  If our culture tells us we can purchase the answer to any problem, we will look to purchase leadership.  This is why corporate CEOs are paid such high salaries.  It is a function of these two cultural constructs in America.

However, if we acknowledge the reality that leadership is powerless without community, our paradigm shifts to see that community is the heart of leadership.  Our paradigm changes from asking "who is the leader?" to "who is leading next?"  This paradigm shift reveals several truths about leadership.

Traditional "leaders" are really visionaries.
The "leader" or "hero" people perceive is not doing all the work.  They are usually the person who has the clearest vision for a group's actions.  However, hierarchies tend to confuse visionaries with positional leaders and disempower communities in the process.

Leadership thrives where there are no clear answers.  So, when trying to create social or organizational change, people will naturally have questions on where to go, what to do and why.  They are not looking for someone with a fancy title to answer their questions, they are looking for someone to communicate a clear vision that can inform their actions.  Today, organizations place the responsibility of communicating the vision of the organization in the mouth of the person with the fanciest title.  So, you can see how we begin to equate leadership with people with fancy titles.  And if you do not have a fancy title, you are not a leader.  Hierarchical structures in organizations perpetuate the perception that leadership is someone else's responsibility.  However, if we see the visionary, not as the "leader," but as one of many important pieces of a community-based leadership movement, we empower everyone in the community to contribute their "gifts" as a critical piece of the collective effort we call leadership.

Leadership is an action, not a person.
When we see leadership as an action, it brings into sharp focus the problem with the concept that leadership is someone else's responsibility.  When leadership is an action, you are either doing something or you are not.  There is no soul searching or personality assessment needed to figure out if you are a leader.  Leadership has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with what you do.  As I like to tell my students, "leading is leading and sitting on your butt is sitting on your butt."

Leadership is a process of community.
When we get away from the idea that leadership is not a person but rather a collective action of community, we see that every person plays a critical role.  It empowers everyone.  It engages the minds and talents of everyone.  It places the responsibility and accountability on everyone.  The action that creates the positive change becomes the focus rather than the hero who is supposed to ride in on a white horse and save us all.

We have to change our paradigm if we want to see progress in our communities on any social issue.  Want to solve something?  Build a community of action that empowers people.  Others will point to it and call it leadership.  Why?  Because leadership is a process of community.  To co-opt a line from Vince Lombardi:

Community isn't everything.  It's the only thing.

For an outstanding roadmap to building community, read Peter Block and John McKnight's "Abundant Community."

Georgia Tech Students Lead Social Change in Health

Georgia Tech Health Leadership Teams, Fall 2011

This week finishes up an amazing semester with Health Leadership Teams at Georgia Tech.  Over the last few months, the students pictured above have touched hundreds of lives on campus with activities and messages for healthier living.  They were all part of the HPS 1040 health class taught by the School of Applied Physiology under the direction of Dr. Teresa Snow.  All the students volunteered to design and launch health improvement programs for extra credit in the class.

The projects were "of the students, by the students and for the students."  After two class sessions on leadership and an additional three-hour training with me on transformational leadership and social change, the students launched their programs.  The programs included:

GT Beginners Fitness Club - Encouraging and motivating students to get active who don't know anything about fitness.  They went twice a week to workout in a no-pressure, fun environment.  Their ad headline was "Can't do a push-up?  Neither Could We!"  

Health Cooking Classes in the Dorms - Students came up with healthy recipes and taught their peers how to cook delicious, healthy food on a student budget at three different dorms.  One event fed fifty students!

Take A Walk In Our Shoe - Campus walking pledge for students to sign.  In just four hours of recruiting, more than 100 students signed the walking pledge and skipped using the campus buses.

Few Steps Can Make A Difference - Thwarted early on by administrative red tape to decorate stairwells on campus, students studied elevator usage vs. stairs usage and interviewed students about why they take one or the other.

Healthy Trunk or Treat - An off-site event for kids in Carrollton, GA.  A 500 person community event now has a voice for health.  Silly Bandz replaced candy and the team made pamphlets detailing the "trick" of obesity and diet-related disease and the "treat" of healthier living and what parents could do for their kids' health.

The Health Leadership projects not only empower students to create needed change on their campus to reverse the health crisis, they increase student learning in a STEM field and bring communities of students together around the shared value of healthy living for all.  You should have heard the stories of the fun students had together, right along side the vitamin and phytonutrient content of butternut squash.  It was an inspiration for all.

In taking the final picture, the students all said, "low-fat CHEESE!"

Stay tuned for the next round of Health Leadership projects.  The next step is expanding the model:  more students, more social change and a healthier world.

Whole Food Desert?

After my first shopping trip to Whole Foods for the food stamp experiment, I have to admit the outlook for this month is bleak.

I used every cost-saving technique I know...
-Make plant-based meals
-No processed junk
-Buy in-season
-Buy in bulk

Even after all that, my grocery bill for the week was nearly double what it was last month.  I'm still under budget, but not much.  For every fruit or vegetable I usually buy, add 30 - 50 cents per pound at Whole Foods.  Same thing with beans and rice in bulk.

And don't even think about buying those same beans and rice in a package with a brand on it.   You'll have to break out the dreaded letter "X"multiplier to double or triple the price.

Every vegetable was perfect as was every fruit and not a flaw was found.  However, the obvious lowest sale price you will see on fruits or vegetables was $1.99 per pound.  That's two or three times a sale price at other stores.  When it comes to sustaining your family, the perfect Braeburn apple is not the first thing on your mind.

While I did manage to stay within my budget, I don't feel like I got a deal on anything... and I was looking for the cheapest stuff I could find.

Whole Foods advertises that they are committed to helping people live healthier lives.  However, it became painfully obvious that their commitment is not to people below the poverty line.

The journey continues...

       

On Food Stamps at Whole Foods

We are continuing to live on a food stamp budget.  This time, we are shopping exclusively at the store known to many as "Whole Paycheck."

I must admit, this was my wife's idea.  I'm on board but more fearful than last month.  Is the classic upper class store able to accommodate the poorest shoppers?  If not, having a Whole Foods around the corner would not be much different than living in a food desert.

Today will be our first shopping trip.  More to come...

Food Stamp Philanthropy

The month of November is coming to close.  My family set out to see if it is possible to live on the $4.73 per person, per day that is provided to the poorest families of Georgia by the SNAP program.  This was a financial experiment to see if eating healthy on a food stamp budget is even possible or is eating healthy on food stamps a myth.

In our experiment, we followed a few guidelines:

1.  The $4.73 per person, per day would be our entire food budget, including eating out.
2.  We would shop at the local grocery stores.  We have two in walking distance about 1.5 miles away.
3.  If we finished under budget, we would donate any extra funds to the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
4.  If it was sustainable for our family, we would continue to live on a food stamp budget.

In our experiment, we found some shopping and eating wisdom.

1.  Eat a plant-based diet.  Legumes, grains, vegetables and fruit are our staples and are also the best value at the market.  Meat, bread and packaged products seemed to be the worst value at the market.
2.  Cook your own food from scratch.  Eating out killed our budget, instantly and decisively.  For example, one serving of oats made at home cost me $.05.  Oatmeal at McDonald's cost $1.99.

It was 40x cheaper to make oatmeal at home than to buy it in a cheap restaurant!  

3.  Grow a garden.  Food stamp money can be used to purchase seeds for a garden.  Plant in pots or anywhere there is dirt.  If it dies, plant it again.  This is a free, renewable source of food.  You don't need to be Martha Stewart.  You don't even need to buy seeds, use the seeds from the pumpkin from Halloween or the tomato in your burger.  Those seeds will grow!
4.  Buy In-Season.  Vegetables that are in-season are cheapest.  That is also the time when organic prices are nearly equal to conventional.  By buying in season, we were able to buy almost all organic vegetables and fruits.

Is it possible to eat healthy on a food stamp budget or is it a myth?  Yes.  It is possible.  Because of our efforts this month, we are donating the amount of money we came under our food stamp budget.  How much?

$100

What does this mean?  It means we can change the conversation away from "is it affordable" to more relevant issues like food deserts, the toxic food environment, basic education about cooking, growing and nutrition, and even more fundamental elements like owning a pot and pan, a hot plate and having time to cook when you are working two or three jobs.    

We are separating the wheat from the chaff.  What are the real barriers to health in America and what are the knee-jerk myths that are just excuses to our progress?

My family will continue to eat on a food stamp budget.  We already have our next month's plan in place.  It is going to be fun and (gulp) more of a challenge than November.    

Reflections on a Thanksgiving Fast

My Thanksgiving fast has come and gone.  It was a 24 hour, water-only fast that revealed some very interesting perspectives for me.

Living your values is far more fulfilling than the food on your plate.  

This was the most powerful thought that continued to resonate for me throughout the day.  I have to note that I was with family, none of whom were fasting.  I helped with cooking and food preparation of the full Thanksgiving meal.  I played with my kids and took walks.  Interestingly, even sitting down with the family as they ate some 20 hours into my fast, I was not particularly hungry nor did I have a strong desire to eat.

However, I am no superhero.  By end of the fast, I experienced bouts of weakness, nausea and the inability to focus.  While my hunger did not grow stronger, my body sent me other strong signals that it was time to eat.  Oddly, Thanksgiving dinner was not at all appetizing.  What my body craved was sugar, in as pure a form as I could find.  I pushed aside all the potatoes, gravy, greens, cranberries, and stuffing and started in on dessert.  Two and a half helpings later of apple cobbler with brown sugar sprinkled over the top and my craving stopped and I started feeling better.

For those who are less fortunate and experience extreme hunger daily, it is no wonder why one would choose foods that:

1.  Are high in sugar.
2.  Are cheap.
3.  Are available everywhere.              

Many of the body's organs run on glucose, a simple sugar.  My craving was not a "I have a taste for..." craving.  It was a primal, "get sugar in your body now!" craving.

Take the issue of food insecurity and add to it the toxic food environment we have created around us and it is no secret that hunger and obesity go hand-in-hand.  Where people are hungry, what is available everywhere for very little money is junk food.

So what do we do about this?  We must grow and support a new food system from the ground up so that those who are hungry get the real food they need before the life-sustaining cravings begin.

Gandhi said of fasting, "What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner."  I believe this is true.  I also believe that if our outer eyes do not see the human condition around us, there can be no amount of introspection that will reveal our true self.  We will only find what is self-like.  Self-ish.

True realization of self can only come through action; through service to others.  We are all connected in the interwoven fabric of existence.  Participate.  Donate your time.  Donate your money.  Open your eyes both outward and inward as an active participant in making the world a hunger-free, health-full and regret-less place.

Fasting on Thanksgiving

As we approach Thanksgiving, I have decided that it will be a day of fasting for me.  In a country where we can eat to excess every meal of every day, enjoying my own privilege and excess does not make me thankful.  It is the absence of abundance that evokes thankfulness for what I have.

On Thanksgiving, I will be surrounded by family, who are all healthy.  What greater abundance do I need?

In approaching a Thanksgiving fast, I came across two pieces of inspiration for me:

Martin Luther King's Thanksgiving Fast for Freedom
In 1964, students from 120 colleges and universities gave up a dinner during Thanksgiving week.  The funds they would have spent on food were donated to feed hungry and impoverished black families in the south.

The second piece of inspiration for me comes from Gandhi.  In 1932, he fasted in opposition to a separate electorate for the "untouchable" class in India.  Gandhi believed strongly in the inherent worth and dignity of all people and was instrumental in helping end the discrimination against the untouchables.  In beginning the fast, he stated:

"By the fast I want to throw the whole of my weight (such as it is) in the scales of justice pure and simple."  

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. 

What a Difference Bulk Makes!

So, my wife came home with a box of healthy cereal (pictured on the right).  One pound of Ezekiel cereal cost us $4.89.  For a second, let's set aside the fact that one pound of this cereal costs more than the SNAP daily $$ allotment for one person.

One box of cereal has eight half-cup servings in it.

$4.89/8 servings = $.61 per serving.

Now, most stores carry oatmeal for $.99/pound.  The two oats containers you see pictured are each 2.5 lbs.

For the same cost as one pound of cereal, I can get five pounds of oats which is 60 half-cup servings! 

$5/60 servings = $.08 per serving

And if I buy my oats in bulk, I get them for $.60 per pound.  That gives me 8.3 pounds of oats for five bucks!

That's 3.3 containers of oats or about 100 servings of oats.

$5/100 servings = $.05 per serving.  

What's the bottom line here?  The boxed cereal costs me 12 times as much as oats.

Unintended Consequences

I have to admit, eating on a food stamp budget has been very revealing.  Today is recycling day in my neighborhood.  In taking the recycling to the curb, I realized that I only had about half of the food containers I normally have.

Eating on a budget has made us purchase far fewer packaged items and far more fresh and bulk items.  Who knew you could eat better for your health and better for the planet all because of a food stamp budget? 

Entertaining on a Budget

This weekend, we invited some friends and family over for dinner.  We remained committed to staying within our SNAP budget.  We did not spend extra because we had additional people coming over.  In total we had seven adults and five kids.  The menu was veggie chili, brown rice, corn bread and boiled peanuts.

We were comfortably within budget and even with the overages from last week, this week we came in under budget and will be donating $30 to the Atlanta Food Bank from our savings.

  

How To Lead

Leadership is not about finding a parade and walking in front of it.  Leadership is a collective action of many people within a community toward a positive good.  


Leadership for a Healthier World does not believe that we should keep secret the principles of how to lead.  Below is the leadership framework I use to teach others how to lead:

Leadership for a Healthier World (LHW) teaches five basic principles of Transformational Leadership, a term coined by leadership scholar James McGregor Burns.  “[Transformational Leadership] occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality… it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both.” 

Classic examples of transformational leaders are Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  LHW teaches this philosophy with the specific intent to create transforming, positive social change in the context of the health crisis of obesity and diet-related disease. 

“I’m here and ready to learn.”

This is the beginning mindset of successful leadership.  Half of leadership is just showing up.  The other element is a willingness to learn.  As Burns notes, Transformational Leadership is a reciprocal relationship between the leader and follower.  Leaders must be willing to be shaped and influenced by followers and the changing environment related to the goal.

Leadership thrives where there are no clear answers.

In his landmark text, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Harvard researcher Ron Heifetz, says that when, “No clear expertise can be found, no single sage has general credibility, no established procedure will suffice… these are the times for leadership.”  In the context of the health crisis, there are no clear pathways for success.  As such, teaching and empowering leadership is essential to creating a new path forward.

Leadership is an action.

Another principle from Heifetz is that leadership is an action.  “Rather than define leadership either as a position of authority in a social structure or as a personal set of characteristics, we [define] leadership as an activity…. the activity of a citizen from any walk of life mobilizing people to do something.”  Defining leadership as an action empowers every community member to be part of the solution.

Values are the language of leadership.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. greeted the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial saying, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”  He does not mention civil rights legislation.  He speaks of freedom and justice.  That is the language of leadership.  Connecting higher values to the end goal of health-improvement is critical to success. Values provide us the reason why we must change and community members are best able to identify which shared community values will provide the greatest motivation for that change.  Values guide decisions, and decisions become actions.

Leadership is a process of community.

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists… [and] when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’” –Lao Tzu

The act of service to others is inherently an effort of community that is also self-sustaining.  When leadership is defined as an action, our paradigm shifts from the question of identifying “who is the leader?” to the more sustainable, “who is leading next?” Each LHW project that is launched is a short-term effort to create a transformational health-improvement environment.  When one project is followed by another project and followed by another, a community can create a much larger, sustainable movement made up of small individual efforts.  Many hands make for light work.   

Over Budget!

The first week came to a close with an unexpected twist.  We went over budget the equivalent of two full days worth of food for the whole family.

What put us over?  An unexpected trip out of town to see family and the need to eat out on occasion.  These were not fancy restaurants.  Meals were $5 - $8 each, but add in tax and tip for the family and suddenly you are tipping one family member's entire day's worth of food stamp money. $4.73.

While this experiment is not perfect, any person could be called to make a weekend trip away for family matters.  Eating out with any regularity would easily blow up any person's budget.  You don't stand a chance at success, even eating the cheapest fast food.

So what do we plan to do?  Stop eating out if we can avoid it at all.  It is the only hope for success.