Whether you are on a limited budget or trying to make your food pounds stretch further, there are several simple ways to eat well and healthily while spending less of your hard-earned cash.
Plan Ahead
Planning your meals for the week ahead and creating a shopping list can help you prevent waste, stretch your food budget and get better nutrition – it helps to avoid those ‘treats’ and ‘little extras’ creeping in at the check-out. Plan your meals around the protein food – the meat, fish, or poultry. This is often the most expensive part of the meal, and check your portion size is a healthy one! Use cheaper ingredients like beans and lentils in stews, chili, curry, and Bolognese to make meat go further, and they are also a great source of fiber.
Find Deals
Before heading off to the shops, check out newspapers and online for discount vouchers and special offers – but only use the ones for foods that fit in with your healthy eating plans. Collect any special bonuses, providing they fit in with your healthy eating plans. Make use of supermarket loyalty schemes – the points often add up, and as they say, ‘every penny counts .’
Look Up, Look Down!
Remember to check the top and bottom shelves for lower-priced items when in-store. Supermarkets always stock the most expensive things they want you to buy at eye level. Own-label products are cheaper and often just as good as branded products, so look around and try these out.
Use Those Leftovers
Buy only what you need and think about how you can use any leftovers in another meal, in a sandwich, or freeze them for another day. Buy locally produced vegetables and fruit in season and think about freezing them if you buy in bulk. Freeze bread and use it as you need, rather than throwing unfinished loaves away.
Ditch the Junk!
Tempting ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offers on highly processed foods and drinks may seem cheap and convenient, but they contain lots of cheaper, unhealthy ingredients such as sugar, processed fats, salt, and other ‘bulking agents .’At the end of the day, they aren’t really good value for money and don’t do your health or weight much good if you overeat them. The more prepared the product is, the less you’ll get for your money – buy a large bag of pasta instead of a frozen pasta dinner or make up a salad at home instead of buying prepared salads.
Careful with Those Ingredients!
It’s great to experiment with cooking new dishes but be careful of recipes that call for expensive one-off ingredients that you may not use again – you could use something similar or look up an alternative recipe online.
Following these few steps could easily save loads of money, and with some simple pre-planning, making ingredients go further, and making ‘special offers’ work for you, your budget can go much further!