Did you know that you can eat healthy food without breaking the bank? In fact, you can eat incredibly well on much more of a frugal budget than you realize. Here’s how:
1. Go Wholefoods & Cook From Scratch
Good quality kitchenware doesn’t have to break the bank. You can always find cookware sets on sale somewhere, and if you learn to cook wholefoods from scratch, you’ll be the hero of your own healthful destiny. It’s much easier than many people realize, and eating this way makes a huge difference because you avoid the extra sugars, salts, and additives of convenience food.
Try Jack Monroe Bootstrap Cook as a starting point for cheap, easy recipes to cook from scratch. They’re not all wholefood recipes, but many are. Most importantly, they’re super cheap to make, especially one of the fan favorites – chickpea and tinned peach curry.
2. Reduced Food Opportunities
Apps like Too Good To Go have been designed to help save the 30% of food that regularly goes to waste in the world. The app allows local businesses to offer up ‘magic bags’ of food at a reduced rate. This allows budget-conscious shoppers to pick up fruit, veggies, bread, wraps, and other healthy options at a reduced price.
If you don’t have anything like this near you, ask an attendant at your local grocery store about the days they generally offer produce at reduced prices. Being a little proactive can help you shop at the right times to snap up bargains.
3. Community Bulk Buy
Although healthy products like legumes and tinned foods are often cheap at the store anyway, they can be even cheaper if you join (or start) a community bulk-buy project.
This is a fantastic way to access healthy wholefoods from wholesalers for bargain prices per unit.
4. Zero Waste Stores
Some 300 million metric tonnes of plastic are produced every year, and it can take up to 500 years to fully decompose. This is a huge issue, and zero waste stores have been started to try and move away from the need for single-use plastic.
At these stores, you can pick up things like dried beans, flour, soup mixes, and natural peanut butter. As long as you take your own containers, you should find that you can get healthy items at a lower cost per container than at the store.
5. Cut Through The Pretentious Fog
Unfortunately, a lot of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’ information out there is from the $4.4 trillion US dollar health and wellness industry. Though they may make a convincing show of caring about your health, many of these companies only care about their products.
More and more people buy into the privileged health tropes promoted by influencers who are being paid to pretend they genuinely use these products. This makes health feel inaccessible to people who can’t relate to the life of privilege these influencers appear to live.
The great news is that you can cut through all that pretentiousness and fakery. You don’t need to eat activated almonds, drink kombucha, or eat Buddha bowls to be healthy. Pursuing good health – physically, mentally, and financially – is about keeping things cost-effective and simple. You don’t need superfoods, you don’t need fermented artisan cabbage, and you don’t need to choke down bee pollen. Instead, focus on learning how to cook and understanding what your food is really made of. Do this, and you’ll be miles better off financially and health-wise.
You don’t need to be wealthy to enjoy wellness. Now that you know how to be healthy on a budget, what will you cook up first?