Eating Healthy Without Breaking the Bank

As I'm thinking about making my grocery list for the next week, I thought I'd share some of my favorite money-saving tips to eating healthy.



1.  Make a List:  I know you've heard this many time before but it is amazing how much this helps our family.  We have been in the "we're too busy to do a week's worth of grocery shopping" mode many times before and it has a great impact on our food budget.  When we haven't done our shopping for the week, my husband ends up stopping at the store on the way home from work which means we need something that we can fix quickly for dinner.  This greatly affects the healthiness of our meals and we seem to spend at least 25% more than the weeks that we do all of our shopping at once.  Take a little while each week to plan out your meals and make sure you plan for all meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner).  Also, if you know your family we need any kind of snacks, plan those too.  Just remember when you get to the store to stick to the list.  You will have planned everything you need to eat, so don't be tempted to grab that extra item because you want another snack or two.  Just remember to not go shopping hungry.

2.  Cutting Out Processed Food:  One criticism you will often find about eating healthy and being on a budget is that healthy food is expensive.  I will admit that it is always the processed foods that are on sale and you rarely every see a buy one get one free sale for fresh produce.  However, the processed food may seem cheap at the time but when you eat it you will never feel quite as full and satisfied for as long as if you had eaten "real" food.  It can actually be a budget saver to make healthy snack choices because you will not need as many snacks.

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3.  Dried Beans:  For a while now I have been buying dried pinto beans to make "re-fried" beans when we have Mexican food but I haven't always done it with other beans.  There are many times a recipe calls for just 1 or 2 cans of beans and as a Mom of 3 I don't always remember ahead of time to soak and cook dried beans when I want to throw a recipe together that's only supposed to take 15 minutes. But, did you know you can freeze cooked beans?  You can take a pound of dried beans, soak, cook them, and freeze them and get the equivalent to 4 cans of beans.  It usually costs about a dollar for a pound of dried beans and then you don't have to worry about all of the extra sodium that's in the canned stuff.  Just grab a portion from your freezer and you're good to go.  Beans are also a great money saver when it comes to adding inexpensive protein to your meal.  Try substituting beans for the meat in some of your favorite recipes such as tacos and enchiladas.

4. The Bulk Section:  If the grocery store you normally shop at does not have a bulk section, try to find one. Even some of the "health" stores that many people think of as being expensive usually have amazing prices in their bulk section.  This is usually the first place I head to when I enter the store because if it is in the bulk section it's pretty much guaranteed to be cheaper than the stuff on the shelves.  If you don't want a bunch of bags cluttering up your pantry it doesn't have to be expensive to store the items either.  I just bought some of the Glad-ware containers and added some labels.  I got the larger ones for things like flour and oats, and the smaller ones for things we keep in smaller amounts like raisins and nuts.  I also ordered some containers to store my spices as they are incredibly cheaper to buy in bulk than in the individual jars.  Some of the thing we buy in bulk are:  flour (even the GF flours), steel cut oats, rolled oats, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, all of our spices, honey.

5.  Turning One Meal into More:  I used to just buy a certain amount of meat, cook a meal and we'd eat the leftovers for lunch the next day.  I thought this was the best idea budget-wise because I wasn't buying more groceries for lunch.  What I've found, though, is that there are a lot of easy healthy ideas for lunch that are inexpensive and I can then use either less meat at dinner or turn those leftovers into other meals. One of my favorites recently was when I made The best whole chicken in a crockpot.  This was by far the easiest (and super yummy) way I've cooked a whole chicken.  We ate some of the chicken for dinner that night and picked of the rest.  I left the bones in the crockpot and made some stock overnight.  I got about 4 quarts of homemade chicken stock for the price of some carrot and celery!  I used the leftover chicken to make some enchiladas another night, used the stock to make some tortilla soup, and I still had some stock left in the freezer.

6.  Plain Yogurt:  My kids love yogurt.  I've always treated it like such a treat because it can get expensive buying the little organic yogurts that I've always gotten for them and then they eat it in about 30 seconds.  The problem with many flavored yogurts though is that there is usually a lot of added sugar and other unnecessary ingredients in it.  Now, my 2-year-old will eat yogurt plain because he just loves it that much, but my daughter insists that she only like "pink" yogurt.  The great thing about plain (not vanilla) greek yogurt is that you can flavor it with anything you want and you know exactly what goes in it.  We cook up a little berries on the stove, puree it with a hand blender, mix it into the yogurt and we have pink yogurt!  The best part is I get my daughter to eat fruit that she might not normally eat plain (although I do make sure to tell her what's in it so that she realizes what she is eating is fruit).  It's even better with some homemade granola on top.

7.  The Farmer's Market:  This is one thing that has made a huge difference in the cost and healthiness of our food.  The growers at our farmer's market are organic and we can often get produce for the same or less price than the non-organic produce at the grocery store.  I also love to know that I'm supporting people in my local community.  This is something that I look forward to each week with the kids.  They get really excited about going and are curious enough to try some new things.  How often do you get to sample the fresh produce in the grocery store?  Shopping at the farmer's market also helps you to buy what's in season which is a big money-saver too.  And if you love strawberries year-round you can buy them in season at a great price, freeze them (or preserve them)  and they will be better than any strawberries you buy in the grocery store in the the middle of winter.

8:  Flavored Water:  I probably don't have to tell you that soda just isn't good for you.  Especially not if you drink it all day.  While I only use to drink soda on occasion when we ate out, I used to be addicted to those little Crystal Light packets.  I've never been a fan of drinking plain water so I just always had those little packets to keep me hydrated.  They didn't have calories so I thought it was ok.  When my doctor put me on a detox diet and sent me to a nutritionist this year, that was the first thing to go.  I knew I would be giving up refined sugar, but my Crystal Light too??  I have found a love for green tea that helps me stay hydrated but I also love homemade flavored water.  There are so many things you can add to water to give it a little something.  It has really made a difference with my kids who will now actually ask for water.  And even when you flavor it, water is much cheaper than soda or crystal light.  Check here for some of Jamie Oliver's ideas for flavoring water.