Nerd Fitness: How to eat healthy without breaking the bank

This is the next installment in a new series on The Next Web, in partnership with Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness. Guides to staying healthy, without giving up your geek lifestyle.

Sorry dude, eating healthy is too expensive!

First of all, dont call me dude. Second of all, yes you can!

If youve followed my Nerd Fitness blog at all, youll no doubt know that Im a big fan of the Paleo Diet it worked like a charm for Saint. It makes logical sense, it absolutely works, its easy to remember what to eat and what not to eat, and theres no counting calories involved.

However, whenever I bring up the Paleo Diet (or some variant of it), the usual push-back I get is but its too expensive to eat healthy!

Now, unless youre living on Cosco bags of Puffed Rice, Ramen Noodles, and Spaghettios, I bet healthy eating isnt too far off from your normal spending habits.

Heres how to dominate the grocery store and minimize the impact on your wallet.

Make it a priority

First and foremost, healthy eating needs to become a priority for you.

In most cases, people are just too lazy or stubborn to ! make cha nges to their diet, and dont feel like putting forth the necessary effort. After all, its certainly easier to roll up to a drive-through window and say Ill take everything on the dollar menu or place an order for Pizza Hut while playing Everquest II (yeah you can seriously do that) than it is go to a grocery store and prepare your own meals.

I could tell you til Im blue in the face that your diet will be 80-90% of your success or failure when it comes to weight loss and healthy living. That no amount of exercise can undo a poor diet, and that changing even a few small habits can cause drastic changes (just ask Optimus Prime). That spending a little bit more money up front now on healthier food can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in health care savings over the remainder of your life. That cleaning up your diet can add years to your life, remove inches from your waistline, make you sleep better, feel better, look better, and live better.

However, unless you have that desire, making the decision to eat healthy will be a constant uphill battle. So first and foremost: make a commitment to start eating better, and back it up with a damn good reason. Whether youre doing it for you, your family, to win a weight-loss competition at work, whatever, DO IT.

Youre going to need to give up some things you dont think you can live without (SPOILER ALERT you can). Youre going to need to learn how to cook a few basic meals instead of ordering pizza every afternoon. Youll probably be eating a lot of the same things on a regular basis. You might even need to make an investment ingasp.Tupperware.

However, once youve made the commitment to healthier eating, all of these decisions get much easier to make and eventually can become habit.

Cut out the ! crap

If youre on a tight budget and cant afford healthy food, do you buy coffee at Starbucks every morning to get you through the work day? How many cans of Mountain Dew do you go through in the afternoon? How often do you visit the vending machine for a bag of Doritos because lunch is still two hours away? Do you bring your lunch or eat out every day?

These small $1-2 purchases on a daily basis that provide no nutritional value whatsoever are whats eating away your food budget.

But Steve, I need MORE CAFFEINE! Okay, if you REALLY need the caffeine (psstyou probably have a caffeine addiction), I might start scaling that back to a more reasonable amount on a daily basis. But thats beside the point if youre still in need of that caffeine, bring in homemade coffee from home, drink the crappy coffee at work, or better yet, switch to green tea leave some bag in your desk at work and brew it when needed. Stop spending $2.50 for Monster Energy Drinks or $2.00 for that 20 oz. Coke. Your money is better spent elsewhere.

Want to know the best part about healthy eating? Once your body makes the adjustment from constantly expecting empty calories (which can certainly take a few weeks), these cravings that youre used to having will gradually start to disappear instead, the healthy meals that you prepare (which well get to in a minute) and the healthy snacks that you bring from home (which well also get to) will keep you full and satisfied and you wont even think about trips to the vending machine or snack bar.

So please stop spending unnecessary money on empty calories that leave you unfulfilled youre already on the path to winning.

Prepare your own meals

This is the motherload. If you can learn to cook two or three basic healthy meals, along with a healthy breakfast option that youre cool with having on a regular basis, you can absolutely dominate a week of healthy living on a cheap budget.

This is what were up against for a cheap meal (rough pricing, will depend on your area):

• McDonalds Quarter Pounder w/Cheese Meal $5.25
• Wendys Dollar Menu Meal (two burgers, small fry, small soda) $3.96
• Burger Kings Double Whopper Meal $4.89

Now, this is assuming that the meal listed above is enough food for you its possible that you might be eating other snacks throughout the day, along with the soda breaks, and more.

So, we need to try and keep our healthy meals to a price at or below roughly $4.00 per meal.

Sounds impossible, right? Wrong! I enlisted the help of my friend, Staci, to show you how she eats super healthy on the cheap. Lets do this.

Whats in a healthy meal? A few key things: protein, vegetables or fruit, and some healthy fats.

• Protein eggs, chicken, fish, pork, or steak
• Your choice of vegetables and/or fruits
• Healthy fats almonds, walnuts, almond butter, cooking with things like olive oil or coconut oil

Pick your meat, fire up some veggiescook em in some healthy oils BOOM Roasted. Earlier this year over on my Nerd Fitness blog, I provided an overview of a super quick and easy chicken ! stir-fry meal that I prepared. It fed a group of four and probably cost a total of $15 in ingredients.

But Steve, that sounds like too much effort on a daily basis! Fair enoughwell get to that in a second lets get to the shopping.

How to dominate the grocery store

Staci holds a PhD in Cheap Paleo Eating, so I asked her to put together some quick advice on how to have a kickass, cheap, healthy eating experience:

Look at different flyers, but only go to one store. Spend about three minutes looking at the grocery ads when they come in each week , and check to see which meats are on sale. Whatever grocery store has the cheapest meat is the one youre going to. Its your protein source, and generally the main component of each of your meals, so base your shopping experience around that. Dont go to four different stores to save fifty cents on apples, youll waste time and money. Pick one store for the meat thats on sale, and then

Buy your fruits and veggies that are on sale at that store. This will go against traditional diet advice (which we tend to avoid around these parts anyway), but never go in with a list! As Staci will tell you, If I go in with a plan of what I want to eat for the week, Ill spend so much money getting every item for that plan. Instead, I just pick out the meat and then wander to the fruits/veggies section and buy whats on sale. Now because you dont have the week planned out, youll need to

Get creative. What if a recipe calls for red peppers but yellow are on sale? It looks like youll be trying something new this week. What if you get home and realize you forgot to buy something? Check to see if you have any clos! e substi tutes or if theres another recipe you can try. Sure it might not be optimal, but youll certainly save money by NOT going back to the store (where youll probably end up buying other things). Now, because the price is our limiting factor here, youll have to

Compromise. Staci LOVES granny smith apples, but this week McIntosh apples were a dollar a pound cheaper ($1.99 vs. $0.99). Guess what shes eating this week? Caviar! Oh wait, I mean McIntosh apples. The same goes for the type of meat shes cooking and the different cuts that are available. Try new stuff if its on sale its GOOD for you to try new things and experiment with new foods.

Prepare in advance! On Sunday night while watching Family Guy or Breaking Bad (I really wish Season 5 started immediately), cook ALL of your lunches and portion things out. Its super easy to chop up chicken into 3oz sections, cook them on a tray in the oven, and then stick them into individual plastic bags in your fridge. Grab one of those and a bag of frozen veggies and bring them with you to work BAM. Lunch.

Buy in bulk and freeze Its possible to never pay more than $1.99 a pound for boneless chicken breast or $5.99 for a pound of steak. If you can find it on sale, buy a WHOLE BUNCH of it (a few pounds), cut it up into smaller pieces and separate into separate bags if you so choose, and freeze it!

Need a funky snack? Think differently! Instead of bags of chips that cost a buck (which dont fill you up), Staci eats 3oz bags of chicken snacks. At $1.99/lb thats a pretty cheap snack, no? Sure its weirdbut who cares? Normal these days is out of shape and overweight. We dont like normal around here!

What about normal snacks? Nuts learn to love em. Buy your nuts/seeds/spices at the bulk area of the grocery store. The kind that you can pick the amount you want and only get the amount you need. Dont waste your money on the individually packaged snacks you can do! better.

Frozen vegetables are amazing Especially the steam-fresh bags of veggies. Theyre a buck each! Sure, maybe not as delicious as fresh veggies, but they wont go bad, theyre so freaking easy to prepare (step 1: stick in microwave. step 2: eat), and theyre cheap! Lets say you eat half a pound of chicken (which is a ton of chicken and TWO bags of steam-fresh veggies, which will certainly fill you up. $2.99 take that BURGER KING!

EAT EVERYTHING YOU BUY - This is what Stacis fridge looks like on grocery shopping day some chicken sausage, two onions, and some eggs. Thats all thats left. The point is, EAT EVERYTHING YOU BUY. Throwing away food is throwing away money.

But I dont know how to cook!

Its not that scary, it doesnt need to be time consuming, and it can actually be fun.

You just need to suck it up and learn to make ONE thing. And then once you can make ONE thing, you can mix it up with a small variation. Ive already highlighted how to make chicken stir-fry, but lets say even that is too tough.

Heres a simple example:

• Buy a bunch of chicken breasts. Cut them into smaller pieces, and place them on a cookie tray lined with tinfoil.
• Coat the chicken with olive oil on both sides.
• Add salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
• Cook in the oven at 375 for 12 minutes, then flip the chicken over and stick it back in for another 12 minutes.
• Stick a bag of veggies in the microwave.

Open bag of veggies and dump onto plate. Put some chicken on plate. Stick rest of chicken in plast! ic baggi es and put in fridge. Use fork to consume chicken and vegetables. Chew. Swallow. Youre welcome!

HOLY CRAP YOU JUST MADE A HEALTHY MEAL!

Now, Im not a great cook, but Im damn good at following directions seriously, you should have seen the Lego sets I used to build as a kid! Now, if only there were directions to follow like that, but for food preparation. Oh wait theyre called recipes

No, theyre not just something your mom uses. There are a MILLION recipe sites online. Marks Daily Apple offers free recipes. A Google search of paleo recipes yields 1.9 million results.

Dont get overwhelmed. Pick ONE recipe, and get good at it. And then pick another, and get good at it. I challenge you to cook ONE new meal per week.

What else do I need to know?

A big question I get is whether or not you need to buy organic. In my opinion, if youre on a tight budget, you can avoid buying organic just make sure you wash all fruits and vegetables (if you bought them fresh).

If you have a little bit more money, you can start buying some organic fruits and veggies, but dont be too hard on yourself pick organic for soft fruits and veggies, but you should be fine with anything that has a more durable outer peel or shell. If you wanna go Organic, these are your best choices to start, and these fruits and veggies you can survive with just regular.

Grass fed beef? This is a tough one, as grass fed beef is often WAY more expensive than regular beef, but generally a much healthier option as grains can have the same effect on cows stomachs as they do our own. Id probably put this as the last change to make as your income increases and you get more serious about a full-on healthy lifestyle. If you are hardcore no-grain paleo but still have a tight budget, treat yourself once every two weeks to a grass-fed steak while sticking to chicken and fish on the other days.

Avoid supplements You dont need to be buying supplements if youre on a tight budget. The ONLY time I might recommend it is if youre coming up short on protein or dont like eggs for breakfast buy a GIANT tub of protein powder online (each serving comes out to less than 50 cents) for a quick protein shake breakfast or post workout meal. If youre worried about your Omega 3s, cheap fish oil supplements. Other than that, spend your money on higher quality food if you have some to spare.

Try farmers markets! Theres no better option for healthy and awesome food than locally grown produce! Google [your town name + farmer's market] and see what pops up. Not only will the food be super healthy and local, but depending on whats in season you can score some amazing deals on fruits and veggies. Just make sure you dont buy more than you can eat or youll be wasting food and money.

What else do you need to know about cheap healthy eating?

What other objections or questions do you have?

Do you have any tips or tricks for folks out ! there wh o need to live on the cheap?

Leave it in the comments and chime in!

Image sources

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