The high cost of eating well

I got my whining about weight-loss and pain out of the way in my previous post, so now I can write about something which really concerns me—the high cost of eating well.  When I signed up for the Las Vegas Losers, one of my plans was just to eat better food than I do now.  I’m a very good eater, and healthy foods are some of my favourite foods, so eating a healthy diet should come easily to me.  I love cucumbers as much as I love chocolate, I crave rutabagas, my idea of a perfect food is a piece of sashimi, etc.  I love a bowl of gently steamed fresh green beans as a snack, and I like my vegetables without butter.  This should be, no pun intended, a piece of cake.

When I hit the grocery store to shop for my lower-cal meals, reality set in.  On my tight budget (tight because I work from home, on commission, and have huge medical bills with no health insurance), I could only afford the food that was bad for me.  Two cucumbers for a cucumber salad would set me back $3, but a dozen Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls was just 99 cents.  A pre-made caesar salad with “lite” dressing (a good meal idea because I’m often too tired to cook) was $3.49, but an entire box of freshly baked cookies was just $3.00.  Chicken breasts were $8; four boxes of macaroni and cheese mix were on sale for $1.  I know I have to keep a lot of ready-to-eat (or “easy-to-prepare") foods on-hand, and anything in that category that was actually healthy was terribly expensive.  In retrospect, there wasn’t much in that category to choose from, anyway.  If I could afford to shop at Whole Foods, I could have any number of prepared taste sensations waiting for me in my refrigerator, but at the local Smiths, my budget “taste sensation” could end up being a 99 cent Banquet frozen dinner with 450 calories and 23 grams of fat.  The Lean Cuisine dinners, which are excellent, can cost almost $4 each if not on sale, yet a “Hungry Man” dinner with something nauseating like “2 pounds of food” cost half that.  It’s very, very difficult to pay so much more for something healthy, when every penny counts.

I love to cook, and wish someone would pay me to lose weight.  I wouldn’t have to tire myself out by working, I could just tire myself out by cooking!  I wish I had a personal chef.  I wish there weren’t so many other huge things to worry about each day beyond what I’m going to cook for dinner, and I wish fresh produce would just magically teleport itself into my refrigerator.

In summation, all I can offer to anyone else in my shoes is this one piece of advice:  if your money is tight and you want a quick meal that won’t make your gall bladder explore, try a frozen turkey dinner.  Even the cheap 99 cent Banquet dinners are fairly low in fat, have a bit of fiber, have a reasonable number of calories, and they even have vegetables!

Posted by on 02/03 at 01:29 AM

  1. Hamberger helper $2, hamberger $3/pounds (more the leaner you get, and forget affording organic).

    Actual cheese, whole grain flour, butter, and milk for a roux plus pasta = a lot more than the box mix.

    Hrm.  I wonder why we’re all fat.  I think I’ll just have some more Ramen…

    Posted by Georg  on  02/03  at  10:08 PM

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