How to Eat Healthy on a Budget

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Healthy eating doesn’t have to be expensive. It is relatively easy to provide nutritious meals that won’t break your weekly food budget. So, before you next venture out to do your weekly food shopping, consider the following points:

Consider cost-per-calorie

When thinking about reducing food costs, it can be helpful to think about the cost-per-calorie. We’re not trying to minimize calories here. Instead, we’re trying to maximize the number of calories for the lowest price.

There is a huge caveat to this thinking though. Oftentimes high-calorie food is also low in nutrients and not particularly healthy. For example, white bread, white sugar, fried food, etc, may be cheap and high in calories — however also unhealthy.

So instead, we are looking for food that is healthy but still low cost-per-calorie. These types of food are good to use as staples when eating frugally. Vegetables may be very healthy but most of them have a high cost-per-calorie since they are low in calories. So basing your diet on vegetables as the main staples would be pretty expensive.

A low cost-per-calorie super-food: olive oil

A good example of a low cost-per-calorie food is olive oil. A high-quality bottle of olive oil may be fairly expensive. However, when you consider that it is both very high in calories, and also healthy — it’s a frugally attractive option.

32 ounces (1 liter) of high-quality organic olive oil is about $12. In terms of calories, there are about 8,040 calories in that bottle. That is almost four days worth of calories for an adult. That would add up to an astonishingly low $3/day cost. This is despite the fact that I used high-quality organic olive oil in this example.

I’m not saying you should start downing bottles and bottles of olive oil — that would make you feel pretty bad. However, it is a good example of a food that is very low cost-per-calorie, while also being healthy. Those types of food should make up the staples of your calorie intake.

Low cost-per-caloriefoods:

Olive oil
Pasture-raised butter
Grains (well-prepared to increase nutrient absorption and reduce inflammation)
Legumes (well-prepared to increase nutrient absorption and reduce inflammation)
Peas
All root fruits: potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, parsnips, carrots, etc

Which ones are more applicable to you will vary depending on your eating style (keto, paleo, vegetarian, vegan, etc).

Consider cost-per-nutrient

There are some other good frugal options that may not be in the low cost-per-calorie category but are still frugal. They are instead low cost-per-nutrient foods. They provide a lot of nutrients for a low price.

Low cost-per-nutrient foods:

Eggs
Organ meats
Dairy

What about vegetables?

While many vegetables have a high cost-per-calorie and fairly high cost-per-nutrient, they are still important to include. They do certainly contain important nutrients and are also vital for the gut microbiome. However, they may be fairly hard to use as the main staple for a frugal eating plan.

Some cheap, and healthy, vegetables are:

Cabbage
Garlic
Onions
Broccoli

Consider more frozen products

Don’t worry though, there are other frugal ways to include vegetables. One of them is to eat more frozen products. Frozen products are often considerably cheaper.

In addition to being cheap, frozen produce often contains more nutrients than their fresh counterparts, because they have been picked when ripe. Fresh vegetables are often picked much earlier so they don’t go bad before hitting the shelves.

Many frozen products are pre-chopped and can be cooked straight from the freezer. This makes them convenient to use. When you buy fresh produce, it has a much shorter shelf life and may expire before you get a chance to use it all.

Eat at home

Take-outs and restaurant dining can bump up your food budget considerably. Try to eat more meals at home to keep your costs down.

Flavor for variety

To avoid the restaurant temptation, make sure to actually flavor your food.

Sometimes your at-home staples can become a little repetitive. For example, if you eat a lot of chicken and rice it may become a little boring after a while. Chicken and rice can become many different meal variations depending on spices, flavorings, and side dishes.

Learn to cook your favorite take-out meals

Another way to avoid the temptation of take-out is to learn to cook your favorite dishes at home. For example, if you often crave sushi or a certain dish from your local Indian restaurant, consider learning how to make those dishes at home.

Cooking courses are offered cheaply online, for example on Udemy or Youtube. But it might also be worth considering taking a course in person — it can be a great way to meet interesting people and make new friends.

Make large batches using an InstantPot

Making larger batches will enable you to put some meals into your freezer for another day. Look out for offers on cheaper cuts of meat, such as chicken thighs and mince. For vegetables, buy what’s in season.

Using an InstantPot can be a great way to easily make large batches of food. Dumping all ingredients into one big meal can provide food for days.

If you want to take it one step further, consider making “freezer meals”. “Freezer meals” is a genius cooking style where you basically make all your prep work during just one day of the month. You then add those prepped ingredients, along with spices, into ziplock bags to put into the freezer. For the rest of the month, you can simply empty that ziplock bag into your InstantPot for your daily meals. Just make sure that you consider cooking time safety when preparing potentially sensitive things (like chicken) in the InstantPot.

Consider nutritional supplements

Getting the full scope of nutrients can be hard today. The nutritional content of the soil, and modern farming practices, have dramatically reduced nutrients in our foods.

A great way to counteract this is to also supplement with whole-food supplements. Organ meat is probably the most nutritionally dense food on the planet. On top of that, organ meat is often discarded in favor of more popular cuts, so it can be an ethical food source as well.

Everyone may not be so excited about eating and preparing organ meat. Luckily, we can find this in supplement form. Ancestral Supplements provide organ meat in high-quality supplements. This can be a great way to get (almost) the full spectrum of vitamins and minerals.

Ancestral Supplements have two supplements that combined create a very good fundamental support — organ blend and bone marrow.

Bottle of Ancestral Supplements organ blend

Bottle of Ancestral Supplements bone marrow

The serving size for each is six capsules. However, you get very far nutritionally from a much smaller dose. Two capsules of their organ blend and one capsule of their bone marrow provide a huge amount of daily nutrients — and totals to just $25 monthly.

	Capsules daily	Bottle cost	Daily cost	Monthly cost
Ancestral Supplements Organ blend	2	$48	$0.5	$16
Ancestral Supplements Bone marrow	1	$52	$0.3	$9
TOTAL COST				$25

Whole-food nutritional supplements can be a great way to make sure that you still get your nutrients when on a budget.

Grow your own

Growing some of your own fruit, vegetables and herbs will help to save you money and give your meals more flavor. If you haven’t got a garden or have limited space, try growing a few herbs in pots on the windowsill or in a window box. Growing herbs are particularly fruitful, because they are easy to grow, add a lot of variety, and are fairly expensive to buy.

If it fits your lifestyle, consider producing other foods as well. Having chickens in your garden can provide cheap access to healthy eggs. Another, more intricate, option, that may attract some, is having an aquaponic pond system to grow both tilapia fish and vegetables cheaply.

Conclusion

Living healthily provides many benefits to physical and mental well-being. Living simply, and frugally, can also provide you with more financial freedom. A good way to start living both more healthily and frugal is by looking at your food costs.

Hopefully, the above tips will help you along the way to make your weekly grocery budget go further.

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