Low-cost eating! You can eat cheap and healthy!

One of my colleagues asked me the other day how she can feed her family healthy food on a tight budget. She was looking for recipes and a meal plan. Luckily, I didn’t have to “recreate the wheel”.

I just sent her to an awesome website from the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion via USDA: Recipes and Tips for Healthy, Thrifty Meals. Although this is an old recipe book and is based on the 1995 Dietary Guidelines, it is still a good guide for healthy eating and frugal meals.

What I think is very useful in this document is that it gives you a grocery list for a week and gives you a 2-week menu for each meal. It also tells you how much of each food you need to buy and serve for the week. For example, if breakfast consists of orange juice, scrambled eggs, hash browns and milk, it will tell you how much of each ingredient you need to buy in order to make this breakfast for 4 people. For each recipe it gives you, it will tell you how long it will take to prepare and cook the food, and the nutrition information for each recipe. Pretty cool, don’t you think?

The only drawback to this meal plan is that it does not stress the importance of whole grains, so when it calls for bread, choose whole wheat bread; when it calls for rice or pasta, choose brown or whole wheat. As well, consider low-sodium options of some foods (tomato soup for example), and choose skim milk and part-skim cheeses (skim is actually cheaper at my grocery store). As well, you could easily buy sugar-free chocolate pudding instead of regular if you want to save some calories (but then it will increase the cost of your groceries), and you could do without the ready-to-drink lemonade and drinking water.

I am actually thinking of giving this meal plan a try and seeing if my husband will eat this food with me. However, with all of the holiday parties we have in the next few weeks, I am going to try this after the New Year. What a great resolution–eat thrifty AND healthy! Not only will it help my waistline and energy level but it will help my bank account too!!!

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