Please don’t ever use the excuse that healthy eating is expensive!
If you shop at the right places and eat in season you will likely find that you are saving money. Especially since living a healthy lifestyle means you will probably eat out less. The above items are an example of what I got from our local fruit and vege shop just the other day, for a grand total of $6.87 we got a lettuce, pumpkin some cauliflower and a 2kg bag of carrots. Now those along with the potato and kumara we have left over from last week, a few frozen vege and most likely a tin of beetroot will form our vegetables for the week. Add some meat and a few staples and it makes for a reasonable shop.
I used to find that eating out chewed up a lot of my money and it wasn’t enough to really notice where my money was going until I stopped doing it and saw how quickly I had spare cash each pay day without reducing any other spending.
There are two points to note in keeping the expenses down while eating healthy – shopping at the right places and eating in season.
Shopping at the right places
Buy your fruit and vegetables from the fruit and vegetable store rather than the supermarket, unless the supermarket is having an awesome special on something I have almost always found the fruit and vege store to be cheaper and our local one often has some pretty good specials on other items such as eggs.
Same goes for meat – shop at butchers where you can and stock up when they have specials. No-one likes paying over $20 a kilo for chicken breast so stock up when it’s $9.99 a kilo! If your skint on freezer space – take the meat out of the trays and take the skin off (if you buy it like this, sometimes it’s a steal compared to skin off breast) and wrap each breast (or portion, depending on what you or your family eat) in either gladwrap or ziplock bags – it saves A LOT of space!
Eat in Season
You know it’s summer when strawberries, pineapples and tomatoes are cheap just like you know when other fruit and vege are expensive. Unless you really want something for a recipe and are willing to pay the price for it just purchase the fruit and vege that are cheap during each season. At the moment pumpkin, carrots and potatoes are cheap so we have been eating a lot of those combined with frozen mixed vegetables. Another tip is not to discount the frozen mixed vegetables as these are often way cheaper than buying the individual vegetables and going to the effort to cut them up and trying to eat them before they go bad (another tip here is to cut them into the size you would use on your plate and freeze them in individual portions as well, or throw them all in the crock pot with some stock and make some soup which can then be frozen).
Do you have any handy hints in keeping prices down in the weekly shop? Do you agree that eating healthy doesn’t have to be expensive or think that junk food is cheaper?