I’m not going to lie, eating healthy isn’t cheap. But it’s not as expensive as most people
think it is either.
If you look at the change to healthy as just substituting,
you know, buying the gluten-free or organic version of the same thing you
already buy, the cost can be scary. The
key is to change the WAY you eat, finding alternatives.
“Convenience” is one of the most expensive things to happen
to our society. Processed and take-out
food is quite costly when you you consider the cost of the actual ingredients
in them. Many of those ingredients
being things you wouldn’t find in your own kitchen (or anyone else’s!) And that’s
not even considering the health costs in our future caused by it...treating
high blood pressure, diabetes, even cancer.
On a busy day, when there is school and work and tutoring
and baseball practice, we may get fast food.
One trip through the Chick-Fil-A drive-through for a petite woman and
her 11 year old son, getting only a couple of sandwiches and sides, not even
drinks, easily comes to $15. I can make
a completely organic dinner consisting of a meat, grain, and vegetable for that
same woman and child, AND the woman’s husband, for less than that.
1. Cut out the processed and fast food, and you’ll
be amazed how much money you have to spend on fresh vegetables. Vegetables that can be bought at a very good
price at farmer’s markets and produce stands.
Personally, I have a weekly home delivery of organic fresh fruits and
vegetables from a local company...and I couldn’t buy the amount of non-organic
produce at the regular grocery store for the same price.
2.
Make your
own food. Cooking can be fun. You can be creative. You’ll discover new things. It takes me about 30 minutes of my time to
make a meal (yes, you may have to roast a chicken for an hour and a half, but
you don’t have to stand there watching it!), the same amount of time it’s going
to take me to drive to a fast food restaurant, wait in line, and drive back
home. If you have older kids, you can
even make them do the cleanup afterwards!
And you CAN cook things ahead of time (or make twice as much as you need
for the current meal) and freeze them for busy days - that is actually my next goal!
3.
Research. Find where you can buy things the
cheapest. For a certain organic product,
I can go to a small “health food” store about a mile from my house and pay
$7. Or I can drive another 2 blocks to
the regular grocery store and get it for about $6. Or, I can drive across town to Whole Foods,
and get it for $4. I drive across town
every week or two to stock up....less convenient, but much cheaper. I drive across town for work and for my son’s
baseball league, why not for my and my family’s health? I also buy our gluten free bread at a local
bakery, and it’s much cheaper and more importantly, much tastier than the
frozen stuff in the grocery store.
4.
Find
alternatives. We limit gluten in our
diet, but I don’t have a pantry full of gluten-free labeled foods. Some of the substitutes, like gluten free
pasta is, in my opinion, icky. My son
doesn’t like pasta anyways and that’s who we limit the gluten for. We eat rice instead. I don’t buy the organic versions of frozen
meals, we eat fresh food and cook it. I
bake cookies, make my own salad dressing and sauces, just flat out don’t eat
certain things.
5. Start small.
Pick one thing you want to change, and do it. Cut out artificial sweeteners, or white
flour, or high fructose syrup, or one less fast food meal a week. When it becomes routine, move on to the next.
Just don’t cut out the wine. ;)
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