Fight Interest

This thought popped into my head today. Why? Because I just started a diet and there seems to be a lot of press about food prices. Yes, food prices are on the rise because overall, the price of most commodities is on the rise. We’ll talk about strategies for dealing with rising prices in a future post. On this one, I’ll just focus on the diet affect on a food budget.

Fast Food
It is true enough that Burger King will charge you less for a Whopper value meal than it does for a salad. But what usually happens when we buy a value meal? We agree to upsize it. Have you looked at the ticket afterward? In many cases, you have spent more than you would have for a salad and a water.

Now take it another way, what if we don’t go for the salad, but instead, we downsize our meal. What if we get a smaller burger. Maybe not the best thing we could eat, but it is usually lower in calories and it costs less.

Groceries
I’ve seen TV dinners that cost less than $3 and of course Mac-n-Cheese is bound to please at just over a buck a shot. But that isn’t realistic. When we grocery shop, we are there to buy food, real food. So, yes, we plunk down $6 for a box of cereal and another $4 for a gallon of milk. We buy the 32 oz jar of spaghetti sauce and the noodles to match.

But diet isn’t always about what you eat, it is about portion control. I just checked out a box of Life cereal in my pantry. I figure I would get five, maybe six bowls of cereal out of a box. The box has 19 servings. That means I’m eating three to four servings each time I eat breakfast. Going forward, I’m going to go through cereal half as fast as I did in the past. And that spaghetti sauce? How about cooking enough pasta to match up with the sauce and then keeping the unused part for another meal?

Health Care
Everyone gets sick. But did you know that fitter people get sick less? There are many illnesses that are tied directly to fitness such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. If you’re under the care of a doctor and/or taking medications for any of these, you know the cost is huge. It is my hope that through diet and exercise, I can stop taking my meds and will have less reason to visit my doctor.

Other
When you’re fitter, you are able to do more things. A couple of examples that come to mind include, being able to walk where you might have driven (saving on gas). And being able to do your own lawn work or other labor, where you might have had to pay someone to do it for you before.

So, in general, I think I might spend more money by selecting healthier items to eat, and I might have to buy more clothes as I lose weight, but I’m definitely going to save in the long run.