The Downshift – The Plan for 2015

I am not one for sticking to my New Year’s Resolutions – or at least, that used to be the case. A few years ago I stopped resolving to lose weight or exercise more, and started setting smaller goals I thought could make more difference in my life. We started resolving things together as a couple. Specific things we could keep each other accountable for. Things like having 100 car-free days in a calendar year, or reducing our trash to a single Sobeys-size bag a week.

Although, ironically, it was a food resolution that kicked off our biggest life changes.

In 2014 we resolved to eat less meat. It wasn’t a great resolution, actually. It didn’t follow the rules of a SMART goal. We just saw that we were eating a lot of bacon (and roasts, and hamburgers), and we thought maybe we should be eating more vegetables.

So we did what you probably shouldn’t do – we made a drastic change for the month of January, going 100% vegetarian for 31 days, a meat-detox if you will. We did it. (Well, Drew did it. I cheated once on day six.)

We felt great. Feeling great was a result we expected. What we didn’t expect was how much that drastic food shift left us thinking about food. How much it left us wanting to learn more about food. Throughout the meat-detox month we had been reading and listening to all kinds of food facts. It led to an even bigger shift – eating on just $200 in February, and, later, eating on $4/day for six weeks in September and October.

I won’t go back into all that here. You can read our $200/month posts HERE, or about the lessons we learned living on $4/day HERE if you’d like.  If you haven’t read those posts, and don’t feel like it, I’ll summarize. It changed us. It changed the way we think about food – how we get it, how we make it, how we make sure everyone has enough.

Our lives started to change pretty drastically last year, though it really was a combination of those small changes over the past few years – the driving less, the reducing our trash. We had been doing those things for a variety of reasons: financial, social, environmental, to achieve a better work-life balance. But it’s resulted in us enjoying an increasingly simple and satisfying lifestyle.

We’ve been influenced by a lot of people we’ve encountered and things we’ve read about along the way, notably the Transition Movement, the Antigonish Movement, and, more recently, traditional Acadien living. And we’ve learned that we are by no means alone. There are many, many people who are taking steps to downshift their lives.

But how do you downshift? Where do you start? That’s what we’ll be trying to tackle this year.

We’re taking a page from what’s worked for us so far. Identifying the issues, setting small goals, tackling things one at a time, asking questions, listening to others.

For the past few months, we’ve been preparing for our ‘Downshift Year’ by looking at our lives and identifying areas for change. We’ve looked at all the things that cost us money – housing, energy, food, entertainment – and what we trade for those things, money or time (or both).

We don’t know how the next year is going to pan out, but by looking at where we’re at and where we want to go we’ve set a base from which we can make decisions. Decisions like is a smart phone really worth the extra $80 a month, or is ordering in worth the trash and cost (remembering that the trade-off is time in the kitchen, equipment, electricity).

We don’t know how the next year will go, but we expect to touch on a subject a month. Expect things like…

  • Cleaning and Decluttering (and selling and sorting etc)
  • Reducing food costs by building a basic pantry
  • Deconstructing meals and planting simple staples (in a condo)
  • Energy (heat, lights, and other things)
  • Transportation
  • Downsizing (phone, TV, etc)

It’s a rough guideline, but at very least we know where our downshift will start. January will be all about STUFF. Clutter and cleaning will be the first order of business for us in 2015. We’ll be saving money and saying goodbye to chemicals with 10 natural ingredients that clean everything in the house and we’ll be packing everything into boxes to get a sense of what we actually use. Look for that first series starting next week on the blog.

We’d love to hear your ideas along the way. Your tips, your challenges, your ideas.

If you’d like to follow along, you can sign up for our eNewsletter. We’ll send you a round-up of our new and upcoming projects once a month: http://eepurl.com/5Vzbj

About the author

Gillian Wesley

Since getting together six years ago, we have given away our television, begun weekly DIY nights, experimented with urban homesteading, challenged ourselves to drive less (100 days car-free in 2013), and have learned more about food security. We have experimented with a range of budgeting strategies, all of which involve consuming less stuff. We buy food with reducing packaging in mind. We got a dog. We have been doing these things for a variety of reasons: financial, social, environmental, to achieve a better work-life balance. It has resulted in us enjoying an increasingly simple and satisfying lifestyle. We’ve been influenced by a lot of people we’ve encountered and things we’ve read about along the way, notably the Transition Movement, the Antigonish Movement, and, more recently, traditional Acadien living. And we’ve learned that we are by no means alone. There are many, many people who are taking steps to downshift their lives. Sign up for our eNewsletter, and we’ll send you a round-up of our new and upcoming projects once a month.