Frugal dieting: food choices
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Obviously, one way to keep costs down when you’re dieting is to avoid buying special dieting foods. They’re almost always priced higher, and sometimes the convenience might be worth it to you, but with a little consideration, you can get better quality, lower cost food that will help you in your dieting adventure. This (somewhat long) post will talk a little bit about how.
Regardless of what diet you’re on, there are going to be luxury items and frugal items. The trick is finding out how to maximize the frugal foods and minimize the expensive ones, while still liking life. Donald of Live Better than a Billionare on $5 Extra a Day has some good ideas, including:
- Find some [frugal and plan-friendly] foods that you love which can be eaten every day.
- Pick out 20 vegetables and fruits that you like that are inexpensive when they are either in season or when dried.
- Substitute dairy products for meats.
- Find low-cost snacks that leave you feeling satisfied.
- …keep several entrees pre-made and frozen [for convenience later].
- Stock up on low-cost, low fat meats when they are on sale.
I highly recommend you read Donald’s full post. He’s coming at it from a Low-Glycemic Index perspective but he has very specific recommendations (e.g. which fruits and veggies are the best buy in his area of the country) that will benefit you regardless of what plan you’re following.
A huge way to save is to cook things yourself. This gives you the added benefit of knowing exactly what you’re eating and being able to tailor food to fit your daily nutritional needs. Some people go all out and do “once a month cooking” where they cook a tremendous amount of food on one day and store it away for consumption throughout the month. I haven’t yet reached that pinnacle of organization, but just cooking breakfast and dinner around my house (instead of relying on prepackaged meals, or—of course—eating out) has saved us a bundle.
If you don’t know how to cook, it’s worth the time and effort to learn. You might benefit from the “learn to cook” cookbooks people have been recommending over at Chef Vault. (If you know how to cook and know of a great cookbook for that purpose, add your comment to that post!)
Here’s another tip for dieters on every plan: consider “Volumetrics” [Amazon affiliate link]. They’ve kind of made it into a diet of its own, but it’s really well suited to being used in conjunction with just about every known diet. I checked the book out from the library, and you might like to do the same, but the concept is really very simple:
People tend to eat the same amount of food by weight every day (assuming they get to decide their portion sizes). Even when calories go up or down, the weight of the food we eat is pretty much stable. Volumetrics is the idea that by eating less “energy dense” foods (foods that have less calories but weigh more), we feel full but consume fewer calories.
The book is kind of fun to look through, because they have a lot of “this meal vs. that meal” images that show two meals with the same amount of calories in each, but one always looks much bigger (because its components are less “energy dense”). An easy way to figure out energy density for yourself is just a simple formula based on the nutritional label: calories divided by grams gives you “energy density.” The lower the number, the better (under 1 is great).
Again, you can use this volumetrics concept on any diet to pick foods within your plan that give you less calories for their weight.
A truly fantastic tool for dieters of all stripes is Nutrition Data. It’s free and has a very comprehensive list of foods, and for every food, it graphically shows where most of the the calories come from (fat, carbs, protein). They provide a quick summary of the food’s pros and cons. And at the bottom of each food detail page, there is a feature I haven’t seen elsewhere: a matrix that shows at a glance how filling it is and how healthful it is. Garbanzo beans, for instance, are moderately filling and more nutritious than the average food. You can also look for other similar foods that are better.
Using these tools and ideas in conjunction with meal planning can help you find the best foods for your diet and save money on them.
It’s funny how cheaper often become healthier. Health is time-consuming at first, but then it becomes an important part of your life.