Maintain Healthy Eating On a Tight Budget
Slash Your Grocery Bill While Still Getting the Best Nutrition
Nov 14, 2008
For anyone trying to eat healthy, the question is where to cut back while getting the most nutritious food possible. And for athletic people in particular, nothing can undo performance gains quite like shoddy nutrition. The last place you want to cut into is the very foundation of your fitness. It may be tempting to allow more junk foods into your cart because they remain cheap, while healthy foods have seen the biggest price increases. But obviously not all calories are equal—it’s the quality of the calorie that counts, or a bag of cheese curls would be as nutritious as the equivalent calories in protein, fruits and vegetables.
The most basic solution revolves around tight planning. You may feel you already do plan, but in order to slash your food bill without taking a hatchet to your nutrition—you’ll need to raise it to an art form.
Think back to what may now seem like the economic glory days. How many fridge sweeps did you cringe through as you tossed out numerous meals-turned-science experiments? That uneaten food represents your old planning.
As you’re planning your workouts for the week, tightly plan your meals along with it. It may seem time-consuming at first, but you’ll soon find:
- It saves you money.
- You waste a lot less food.
- A savings in time because you know what you’re going to eat each meal.
It’s not as daunting a task as it appears. You can begin by taking stock of what you already have on hand and build from there. For healthy balance, think in food groups as you plan. The Harvard School of Public Health released their version of the classic (and recently revised) food pyramid, calling it the Healthy Eating Pyramid. It’s a healthier repackaging of the traditional, government-designated food groups that offers examples to guide your choices.
One of the most important distinctions is how it categorizes foods. For example, all grains aren’t lumped into the grain category. Whole grains, such as brown rice, are distinguished from refined grains, such as white rice. Refined grains—stripped of their nutrition—are relegated to the small “use sparingly” end of the pyramid. Beef is in this section as well, while other traditional “meat” category choices such as fish and poultry are placed higher in the pyramid. That’s great for the budget-conscious, when you consider that beef prices are 7 percent higher than last year’s prices.
If you’re eating the recommended 4 to 6 small meals per day, sketch out what those meals will be. With grocery store ads in hand, plan around what’s on sale—and think in terms of cross purposing. For example, if a bag of carrots is on sale, they can be used over the course of a week added to soup, cut up for dipping, and steamed as a side dish. A bag of beans can be cooked up for soup, burrito filler, and puréed into a dip to be used with those carrots.
The upshot is that you’ll be using everything when it’s fresh, rather than just a portion that you’ll eventually pull out of the refrigerator as a stale bag or fermenting bowl that ends up in the garbage—representing a wasted portion of your food budget. You may even find you’re eating better by making exhaustive use of the freshest foods you have.
