Dieting and the Rising Cost of Living

So this started life as me moaning about being poor and ended up going off on a slight tangent: When you’ve been dieting for months, and have basically been living off porridge oats, lettuce, cucumber and 20p tins of tuna, you finally reach your target weight/size and realise that the cost of living has increased by so much that you can no longer afford to replace the clothes that are now several sizes too big for you and, since your wages haven’t gone up at all, you can’t even afford a sustainable and healthy calorie intake that would allow you to maintain your current weight.

It’s strange how the extremely rich, and extremely well paid, people working at the top levels of government seem to think that the minimum wage is a ‘living’ wage. These people have never and will never experience life at the low end of the pay scale. I work full time, I work in a fast paced, mentally draining environment, I come home tired every single night, I’m actually paid above the national minimum wage and what I earn would barely be enough for a single person, living on their own, to survive on never mind actually have a decent quality of life on. I honestly don’t know how the minimum wage could ever be referred to as, or actually considered to be, a 'living’ wage.