How to Eat Healthy on a Budget

For most South Africans, payday is usually on the 25th of the month and with the grocery cupboard and freezer running low on supplies, meals are usually not that healthy. So how do we eat healthy on a budget?

One word: Planning. I buy all my meat for the month at once and freeze it. I make sure that there is at least 1 packet of meat for each day. So if there’re 31 days in the month, I make sure I have meat for 31 days. I have found that buying our meat from Makro, whose meat is blinking fantastic, super affordable, and ordering our weekly veggies and eggs at the beginning of the month from Farm Fresh Online has make a HUGE difference.

Our veggie box gets delivered at the same time every week and they last us the whole week. As a family of 6, we go through a lot of food during the month and this has helped a ton and has saved me so much stress.

Since my diagnosis in February 2017, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research and, initially, finding food that I could eat was really hard. That is, until I discovered that I can eat all the food on the Banting Green List. Farm Fresh Online has made this so much easier for me too. I order their Family Veggie Banting Box (Green List Only) and 18 eggs a week and there are some weeks where I have veggies left over. If there are some things we don’t enjoy, I just ask them to omit those and they replace it with something else. I have discovered so many new foods (like Eggplants and Brussel Sprouts) that we love, and some we really don’t (like Asparagus, LOL).

Eating healthy doesn’t mean that you only eat salad and “rabbit food”. There are so many options out there and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. We are on a limited budget and we eat well every day.