Life changes.... reducing my consumption.

Hi!  I'm Tim, and I'm a typical american,  massively overweight, over consume, and live in a giant house for two people.   And this year I start the change from all of that.   Losing weight,  stop consuming unless it is needed, and time to downsize.   I.E.  live like a typical big city European citizen.

Honestly,  if most Americans take a look at their lives the will see what I see.   Two people living in a 1500 square foot home that we barely use 1/2 of is silly.  I am paying all that money every month to heat/cool/maintain that 3 bedroom 2 bath with a full finished basement that is used to store crap we never ever touch or use.  3 Cars, 2 motorcycles, 2 recumbent bikes we have not ridden since last summer.  etc...   Plus we eat out too much,  when it's just two of you  eating out a LOT is less expensive feeling.  Well it still has a high cost,  because all restaurant food is bad for you compared to what you make at home.  Time to reduce,  time to get off my butt,  time to stop wasting money.

I started with reducing our power consumption....  I bought a device to measure how much power we consume in real time,  the TED5000 power meter is the cheapest choice right now and it works good enough to detect a very small power load.    This is when I discovered that even when we are not at home, the house is consuming about 600 watts of power 24 hours a day 7 days a week.   This is power that is being thrown away.  So I started to look at what is plugged in and unplugging everything that I did not need on all the time.   After about 2 months I have been able to reduce our power usage by almost 50% compared to when my daughter was at home last year.   I saw first hand what a real time logging of information can do to fix a problem you dont pay attention to.   So I decided to adjust my own consumption by buying a fitbit device that records my personal activity 24/7   this device records every step I take.  Every fidget in my chair and every time I veg out in front of the TV.  It puts in my face how much I am not doing.  How badly I am being a lazy bum and points out that I need to get up and walk around every so often.

Granted, buying things to reduce consumption is a wierd idea,   but you cant make changes if  you dont have a data baseline to measure from.