Healthy Eating on a Tight Budget

I am not a doctor.

Or a nurse.

Or a dietician.

Or a cook.

Or an accountant.

All of which may help to explain why I'm 20lbs overweight with bad cholesterol, and living from paycheck to paycheck. But that has motivated me to do better with my shopping and eating habits, and I've picked up and figured out some tips for eating well on little money.

It's actually not too difficult to eat healthy. Or to eat on a budget. The trick is doing both at the same time. You can eat fairly low-fat with very little effort by buying frozen dinners from "Lean Cuisine", "Healthy Choice" and "Weight Watchers", or ordering the "heart-smart" entré(s) at restaurants. But that costs a fortune. You can save money by sticking to the cheapest generic items on your grocery store's shelves. But they tend to be nutrition-lacking, sugar-filled, artery-clogging, blood-pressure-escalating crap that'll kill you.

It's a balancing act. But I'm discovering it can be done. Here's what I've learned so far:

First, ya gotta cook. I don't enjoy it, and Mom never really taught me that much (figuring I'd one day have a wife to do it), so I'm no iron chef. But the basics aren't that hard to pick up. For the seriously new-to-the-stove, a book such as Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen! or something of its ilk might help. But reading the instructions on boxes of macaroni & cheese, Rice A Roni, and Hamburger Helper are where I learned a lot of what I know about food preparation.

Mac & cheese is also where I learned that those instructions are not etched on stone tablets. My senior year in college, I lived in a house off-campus but was still on the cafeteria meal plan, so I didn't exactly keep a well-stocked kitchen. 25-cent boxes of M&C were a cheap and easy option for when I accidentally slept through lunch on the weekend, but I didn't fix it often, so the milk I bought for it kept going sour before I used it up. Plus, the ecosystem thriving in the house fridge was no place to put opened containers; only factory-sealed items such as beer remained safe for human consumption. So I figured out that mac & cheese could also be prepared without milk. It wasn't as good, but it was OK. And for that matter, if there was no margarine (which I kept in the house freezer for better sterility), the stuff was still edible. With that lesson learned, boxed macaroni & cheese became a perennial "emergency" item in my cupboard.

Hamburger Helper and Rice A Roni are also some of my best friends. I've read guides to budget shopping that scream at you to avoid stuff like Hamburger Helper, because it's just an overpriced box of cheap pasta or rice with some pre-measured powdered sauce. And once you add in the cost of the meat and other ingredients you have to add yourself, it's not that great a bargain. And definitely not low-fat.

That's why you have to ignore parts of the instructions. Like the bit about browning some ground beef in the pan before you add the contents of the box. I'm no vegetotalitarian, but I know that beef is A) expensive, B) bad for your cholesterol, and C) not actually needed in a pasta or rice dish. And even though they're not as bad for you, the chicken in Chicken Helper, and the tuna in Tuna Helper aren't necessary either. (I actually hate tuna, but some of the Tuna Helper dishes are good, without it.)

Instead of meat, buy some plain old packages of store-brand pasta, in the same shapes that come in your Hamburger Helper boxes. You can get enough pasta for several meals for less than a single box of Helper. Then when you prepare dinner, add in the same amount of pasta that came in the box, and you've filled out your meatless dish into a super-sized portion again. Better yet, save half of it for tomorrow, and you've just stretched that little packet of overpriced powdered sauce to make two meals, not one.

The good news is that these meals contain plenty of grains and usually some dairy, but the bad news is they have only traces of veggies. You can make up for that (and make them go a little further) by adding some frozen veggies to them when you start to boil the pasta. Large bags of store-brand corn, peas, beans, broccoli, etc. aren't too expensive, and this is a really easy way to cook and eat them. In fact, one of the great things about boiling veggies is that if you do it long enough, even the most dried-up freezer-burned ones recover pretty well, especially when smothered lightly in sauce and pasta. For example, corn and/or kidney beans go well in Mexican-style dishes, chopped carrots are good in mac and cheese, broccoli is nice in alfredo sauce.

One good thing about these foods is that (freezer burn notwithstanding) they keep well. So if you see them on sale, you can stock up and store them. I check the Sunday paper for coupons as well, and then double-team them when they go on sale. So I might get $1.50 off the purchase of 4 boxes of Helper from the coupon, in addition to them being on sale for 75 cents off each, for a total of $4.50 saved.

By this point I'm saving quite a bit over those frozen low-fat dinners I can't afford anymore. The bad news is that I miss being able to toss one of them in the microwave and then pull it out and eat it a few minutes later. To help with that, I've been taking an hour or so over the weekend, and fixing a whole week's worth of dinners ahead of time. Get a few pots going at the same time, plus maybe a dish or two of boxed potatoes-and-sauce in the oven, and it doesn't take too long. Put them in sealable plastic containers, and shove 'em in the fridge. Then when I get home from work during the week, I can just pull one out, heat it (or not), grab a spoon or fork, and munch away.

A little cooking - very little - solves the high cost and dubious nutrition of breakfast as well. Breakfast cereals are ridiculously expensive, even with coupons, and usually loaded with empty calories. Oatmeal - especially store brand, which isn't distinguishable in any way I can see from Quaker brand - is much cheaper, and better for you. Not the little pre-flavored "instant" packets, just plain old... oatmeal. I can't eat the stuff plain, but a little honey makes it just fine. Oh, and here's where to ignore the preparation instructions completely. Don't boil water, etc. Just pour it in a bowl, add enough water to cover all the oatmeal, add some honey, stir, and nuke it for maybe a minute.

A little more work, but also cheap and healthy is pancakes. A box of pancake mix is really inexpensive, and all you have to do is spray a frying pan with canola oil, add water to the powder, stir, and pour. Instead of smothering the pancakes with syrup, you can add a little honey or jam to the mix before you start pouring, and they come out quite tasty.

I used to bring the smaller frozen entrés to work with me for lunch, but lately I've kicked that habit. Since, come noon, I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I have the will to pack for myself in the morning, I go health-fascist here: chop up a couple carrots and toss in an apple (the cheap bagged ones, not the pick-them-out-and-weigh-them-at-the-checkout ones). And I'm actually kinda liking it: easy to munch on at my desk (I don't get a paid lunch break), and no afternoon drowsiness from eating (or drinking) more heavily.

Beverages are a good place to save money. The first, most obvious step I took when I became unemployed the first time was to switch from good beer to the cheap stuff. I don't know for sure, but maybe the fact that I don't enjoy the taste of it so much has helped keep my drinking in check. Or maybe the lower price has made it easier for me to drink too much. Hard to say. In any case, beer - of whatever price - is just empty calories, so for a while I made myself "earn" it, usually by going for a run first (one minute per ounce). Currently I'm just giving myself a budget of $X/week to spend on beer, and when I blow it on the occasional bottle of good beer, that's just less beer that I drink.

Pop (that's what soft drinks are called in this part of the U.S.; deal with it, outsiders) is typically terrible for both body and budget... but it doesn't have to be. I switched to diet pop years ago, and aside from the smaller selection of flavors, I don't mind it a bit. In fact, sugared pop tastes sickly and sticky sweet to me now. As for the cost, have you ever noticed that a single half-liter bottle costs almost as much as a 2-liter bottle? So buy the 2-liters, and use those to refill half-liter bottles to take with you for lunch or whatever. If you drink pop a lot, that'll save you a lot. And get over the silly Pepsi-vs.-Coke brand loyalties; I buy whatever's on sale that week. (Except for the store brand diet cola, which I just don't like. No point in being miserable to save a couple dimes.)

Diet pop may not be empty calories, but it's still... empty. Juice is better for you. But it can be expensive as well. The trick there is to water it down. Seriously. Most people don't get enough water in their diet, and let's face it: drinking plain glasses of water just isn't that appealing. I usually cut my juice (frozen or bottled) in half or thirds. If it helps, don't think of it as watered-down juice; think of it as fruit-flavored water. (I've recently seen some overpriced bottled drinks of that sort; this is a much cheaper version of that.)

A good cheap snack is popcorn. Movie theaters may charge you dollars per ounce, but you can buy bags of just plain popcorn for very little money. Forget the microwave-ready bags, and invest in a hot-air popper. And skip smothering the popcorn with butter and salt; it's actually pretty good plain.

So that's some of the stuff I do to keep my belly full - but not too full - while keeping my wallet from becoming empty. I welcome additional suggestions.