Healthy Diet, On a BUDGET!

Lizzy622

I bag pita breads up in pairs and freeze them, same as wraps and bread. Take them out half an hour before making pack-up and they're fine.

Buy some freezer bags and containers. One of the biggest money drains is spoiled food. By packing in single serving portions and freezing what you won't be using soon, you can save tons of money.

martinel2099

Here's some tips,

Try to avoid the whole food organic fad. I do enjoy me some organic foods especially a lot of the organic meats, but this is a luxury item for me and not essential.

The grocery store is already a great start, try to avoid name brands and purchase store brands where you can. I shop at giant and I honestly can't tell the difference most of the time (some exceptions) between store and brand name items.

Rice and beans are a great way to keep you full on a budget. Buying chicken and other meats in bulk (like from costco) then freezing is a great way to keep it low.

I highly encourage exercise, just remember that the more you exercise the more you need to eat to fuel your body properly. If you are working to lose weight you can do that solely by your choice of foods and eating at a calorie deficit. I would highly recommend that if you want to spend time at the gym to start a beginners heavy lifting program and do light cardio after or on in between lifting days. Heavy lifting does not burn as much calories but you will love the benefits from how you look and feel after. Cardio is great to give you extra room for sweets and treats and for general heart and joint health.

martinel2099

Just to add, the point of heavy lifting is to help mitiage muscle loss when eating at a calorie deficit and it will help you gain strength as well. After you lose the weight you can also keep up the heavy lifting to put on some muscle (eating at a small surplus) and you'll love how your body looks and feels.

BEquality

You guys have been so helpful!! I am looking forward to going shopping! and i definitely will let you guys know how it goes! Im so excited!
Any ideas on Beginner workouts at home? Or Dvds that are good? I am pretty overweight so I wanna find something that works, but that I also am able to do! Only ones ive heard of are p90 and insanity, and I dont think i am quite ready for that

I still stick by my WinCo rec, hehe. They really do have a lot of great stuff. The bulk section, fruits, veggies, low-cal salad dressing, healthy meats, healthy cheeses, low-calorie oatmeal/hot cereal, almond milk/coconut milk, and a lot more. Plus, if you bring in a bunch of reusable bags, you get a discount per bag (and more if you bring in 10+ bags!), even if you don't fill all of them.

Anyway, back to your most recent post! Personally, I recommend Just Dance 3 or Just Dance 2014. I have those games for the Wii, and it's a good way to get started. I still do them when I'm not up to going to the gym, and it's a lot of fun. There are also some good workouts on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN8cwK3zM20 is my favourite simple warm-up. Fitness Blender has a LOT of workout videos. I had a sciatica flare-up for a week or two and working out helped me get through it quicker and with less pain (than my first incidence of it in March, which was horrible). The Just Dance games I play have fitness modes too... they're different from one another, but it's not too confusing.

To make sure I am drinking enough water, I have a couple different bottles I drink, refill, chill, repeat. I also bring one with me when I go out, whether it's grocery shopping, another errand, or something else. It helps. Although, there's a hashtag on Instagram that really fits here -- #drinkallthewaterpeeallthetime. ^_^ If you tire of plain water, there are a lot of zero-calorie flavour drops that are really tasty.

Also also. When serving yourself food, use smaller bowls. I saw that tip on another post earlier, and it totally works. I put a couple servings of what I made for dinner in a smaller bowl than I had planned on, and I stuck to those servings and saved the rest for later. Aaaaand I'll stop, I'm rambling a lot.

going2heaven87

Eating breakfast does not make someone healthy. It is o.k. to skip it. All that matters is how many calories you ate in the 24 hour period.

It also matters how many calories you put out. If you skip a nice energy filled breakfast, you may burn less calories throughout the day due to less energy early on (even if you don't notice it) which results in less weight lost. I like to prepare my breakfast the night before since I have to be at the gym at 6 AM. If I don't, I will skip it and be sluggish during my workout.

going2heaven87

Hey Fitness Pals, I am so new to this! I really wanna buckle down and get healthy!! I have just moved back home to my dads, and eating healthy has been hard! I think I need to start buying some groceries for myself, but I am also saving for a place. So any ideas on how to shop for healthy foods on a budget?? Any advice would help! I'll even take grocery list! Also, any ideas on how to motivate myself to get up and eat breakfast !! Lol. I love to sleep, and I am not a morning person! But I want to change my lifestyle so bad!! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks all!

Former extreme couponer here (and I have the butt to prove it). I still use coupons and always recommend them for the products you already buy.

Ways to get coupons:

contact companies- figure out which brands you buy, go to their website, give them a compliment and butter them up and ask if they have coupons available. Many companies will mail them to you for free and sometimes include coupons to get a product for free! Bolthouse farms carrots, cal-organic, pacific food and any company under tha Hain-Celestial group send out coupons on request.

print them- many websites such as commonkindness.com, mambosprouts.com and coupons.com offer coupons for healthy foods. you can print them directly from your home computer (this is my main source of coupons).

the sunday paper- I don't recommend paying $2 for a sunday paper just for coupons if you are eating healthy because most of the food coupons in them are processed junk. If you get the mid week coupons in your mailbox, then you might start cutting those out to help you save.

Of course you also want to look at your stores weekly sales. My best tip to everybody is take advantage of Walmart's price match policy! Every week I take Aldi's ad to walmart which has the dirt cheap produce and price match it at Walmart. You can get a 3 pack of bell peppers for $1.49, buy 4-5 packs, wash them, cut them up, flash freeze them and you have bell peppers for a while. Same with other veggies and fruit too! If whole grain bread is on sale, get 10 loaves and store them in the freezer.

Where the real deal comes in is when you find something on sale AND have a coupon for it!

going2heaven87

Here's some tips,

Try to avoid the whole food organic fad. I do enjoy me some organic foods especially a lot of the organic meats, but this is a luxury item for me and not essential.

The grocery store is already a great start, try to avoid name brands and purchase store brands where you can. I shop at giant and I honestly can't tell the difference most of the time (some exceptions) between store and brand name items.

Rice and beans are a great way to keep you full on a budget. Buying chicken and other meats in bulk (like from costco) then freezing is a great way to keep it low.

I highly encourage exercise, just remember that the more you exercise the more you need to eat to fuel your body properly. If you are working to lose weight you can do that solely by your choice of foods and eating at a calorie deficit. I would highly recommend that if you want to spend time at the gym to start a beginners heavy lifting program and do light cardio after or on in between lifting days. Heavy lifting does not burn as much calories but you will love the benefits from how you look and feel after. Cardio is great to give you extra room for sweets and treats and for general heart and joint health.

It's sad to think that avoiding GMO's is a "fad". At what point did it become acceptable to genetically modify foods (yes, even the seeds which our conventional produce are grow from) and consume them? I use to get Tyson chicken for dirt cheap with coupons and thought I was eating healthy until I found out how they raise the chickens and all the hormones, steroids, antibiotics ect that are in the chickens. You literally are what you eat and I know I don't want to be a genetically modified being nor do I want my kids to be pumped full of hormones. We are organic beings, so it makes sense to me to avoid GMOs and eat organic when I can (which is almost always).

melindafritz1976

aldis
save a lot
sales
coupons

melindafritz1976

you do need to eat in the morning
to give you energy
and stuff

lollyhackett

Great post!

There are so many ways to save money and buget on meals, I could go into a long spiel of ideas but head on over to pinterest for literally tens of thousands of ideas for low cost meals:

Here's just one example!

http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=budget meals

Have fun!!

melindafritz1976

maybe plan some good breakfasts
so you will want to get up and eat

AmyLRed

a friend of mine on facebook posted this the other day, in regards to cooking, eating well, and staying on a really tight budget. She has a family of four.

"Sunday dinner. Mmm. A roast chicken, roasted baby red potatoes(with a couple of sweet potatoes tossed in, too) and bacon balsamic sautéed collard greens with mushrooms.

As I've posted before about how it is so much cheaper to eat real, healthy food, I would like to once again encourage you to consider the cost of this meal.

I try to cook at least 1 whole chicken a week. So, for $6.50, My family gets protein for 2 meals, a generous portion of white meat for walts lunch at work, and a pot of nutritious bone broth/chicken stock for a soup meal later in the week. I get about 10 cups of stock, give or take from each carcass. A can of broth in the store is about 2 cups for ?? Maybe a dollar? I don't know since it has been years since I bought any. So, I think I can reasonably say we used $2 worth of chicken. I won't even subtract what I saved fully on stock.

The red potatoes were fresh, local, sweet and beautiful. We used about $2 worth for our meal(I subtracted the portion I packed in walts lunch). The 2 sweet potatoes I used were very small. At the store I bought about 8 for under $3, so, I'd say I used $0.75 worth for this meal. $2.75 for potatoes.

The collards were $1.24,the free bacon flavor came from strained grease from frying bacon. (Did you know that cooked, strained, refrigerated bacon grease doesn't go bad and adds great flavor to sauté?) I used the remaining half of the $1.88 pkg of mushrooms I opened to used In the stir fry yesterday. So, $0.94 worth?
I also used 1 onion. A 3lb pkg is $2.48 at walmart and has around 7 onions. So, under $0.40. I then took 1/5 of this dish out for Walt's lunch. So, $2 for this.

So...this adds up to about $6.75 for our family's meal. It is probably one of the more expensive meals we will eat this week, too, because the red potatoes were a splurge. We will eat brown rice, pasta and/or sweet potato most other days.

Please. Be encouraged."


For $6.75, and being their most expensive meal of the week, that's a pretty great cost to feed 4 people. It CAN be done! that's the same price as one mcdonalds meal . I know this may or may not apply to your situation in that you are living with your dad, but its an example of how to cook well on a budget and use parts of one meal in your next days meals.

yayamarieg

I still stick by my WinCo rec, hehe. They really do have a lot of great stuff. The bulk section, fruits, veggies, low-cal salad dressing, healthy meats, healthy cheeses, low-calorie oatmeal/hot cereal, almond milk/coconut milk, and a lot more. Plus, if you bring in a bunch of reusable bags, you get a discount per bag (and more if you bring in 10+ bags!), even if you don't fill all of them.

Anyway, back to your most recent post! Personally, I recommend Just Dance 3 or Just Dance 2014. I have those games for the Wii, and it's a good way to get started. I still do them when I'm not up to going to the gym, and it's a lot of fun. There are also some good workouts on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN8cwK3zM20 is my favourite simple warm-up. Fitness Blender has a LOT of workout videos. I had a sciatica flare-up for a week or two and working out helped me get through it quicker and with less pain (than my first incidence of it in March, which was horrible). The Just Dance games I play have fitness modes too... they're different from one another, but it's not too confusing.

To make sure I am drinking enough water, I have a couple different bottles I drink, refill, chill, repeat. I also bring one with me when I go out, whether it's grocery shopping, another errand, or something else. It helps. Although, there's a hashtag on Instagram that really fits here -- #drinkallthewaterpeeallthetime. ^_^ If you tire of plain water, there are a lot of zero-calorie flavour drops that are really tasty.

Also also. When serving yourself food, use smaller bowls. I saw that tip on another post earlier, and it totally works. I put a couple servings of what I made for dinner in a smaller bowl than I had planned on, and I stuck to those servings and saved the rest for later. Aaaaand I'll stop, I'm rambling a lot.
[/quote]

Thanks so much doll! I too had an issue with my sciatica, but ive noticed keeping active , I have less flare ups! All of your tips have been so helpful! especially the water idea. i am one of those few people who would rather quench my thirst then feed my hunger sometimes Lol, basically i am always thirsty! I will definitely have to try your idea. Thanks again!