How to Eat Healthier Without Increasing Your Grocery Costs

Feeding the family on a budget can be challenging, especially if you're trying to live healthily. Many parents get overwhelmed with the tasks of work and child raising and find themselves eating out or bringing home takeout many nights per week. This can seem like a practical choice until you calculate the sheer volume of sugar, salt, and processed foods used in modern restaurant food and instant meals at home. The reality is that by cooking at home, you can both cut down on your family's food costs and eat far healthier than you were eating before. The simple ingredients needed to make delicious family meals are often far better for you than anything you can get on-demand.

Of course, most of us tend to think of healthier eating as switching to "health food," which is associated with much higher grocery costs. This simply isn't true. By shopping with awareness, you can easily find all the grocery staples you need for below the amount you were spending on restaurants and freezer meals.

Eating Healthy (and Well) On a Grocery Budget

If you ask the internet how to eat healthier, you'll get tons of fun suggestions for high-priced and off-season produce. You'll likely find cooking suggestions for fillets of expensive salmon, or bloggers enthusing over recipes your kids wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. All of which cost more than three times your typical grocery budget. Fortunately for all of us, eating healthy doesn't actually require you to switch to a diet of kale and fresh-caught tilapia.

In fact, you can feed your whole family delicious, much healthier meals using staples that are sold for low-cost in bulk at the grocery store. Today, we're taking a lightning tour on how you can rebuild your menu for better health and digestion without splurging on crazy produce or cooking things that look like they come from an alien planet.

Dodge the Freezer Section

Step one: Stay away from the freezer section. Everything breaded, fried, or pre-portioned is much more likely to be high in saturated fats and low on real nutrients. Even Lean Cuisines and other things that claim to have veggies often have their veggies so rendered down as to offer few real nutrients and absolutely no fiber value.

Skip the corn dogs, tater tots, bags of fries, frozen dinners, and pot-pies. Okay, grab one bag of fries to help your kids make the transition. But veer away from feeding the family frozen goodies. Don't worry, the rest of this plan is pretty fast to cook.

Invest in a Rice-Cooker

The one expense we're going to advise is investing in a rice cooker. You might want to save up for a good one that can cook at least two cups of uncooked rice at a time. This will save you hours (and pan-bottoms) over the upcoming years of healthy eating. A rice cooker can create perfect rice every time without sticking to the pot, scorching, or creating a soggy mess. Not to mention, it can keep rice fresh, warm, and ready to eat for literal days. So, for the busy chef short on time and on a small budget, the rice cooker is a lifesaver. Trust a writer who has lived with one quite happily for years.

Proteins: Chicken and Eggs

It's true; lean beef costs a lot more than ground chuck. But chicken is the same price no matter how you slice and cook it, and eggs are the most inexpensive, versatile protein in the grocery store. By getting creative with a million different ways to cook a chicken breast, you can save your wallet and your arteries years of grief. There's stir-fry, kebabs, soups, casseroles... Chicken is an awesome(ly cheap and lean) meat when you know how to diversify.

Eggs are also great. They can make dozens of breakfasts, make stir-frys more hearty (scramble eggs into the veggies for a flavour boost you wouldn't believe), and omelet slices mix into a surprising number of dishes deliciously. Never underestimate the value of an 18-pack of large eggs.

If you cook ground chuck, we suggest you break out the BBQ so that the fat drips down into the fire instead of into your family's bellies. But for everything else, go for the bird.