Hi friends! Hope you’ve had a fantastic weekend! Mine was filled with some great family visiting today, fun at the batting cage, & some meals out with Mr. Nutty. ;-)
Tonight, I thought I’d address a pretty important issue for a lot of us – grocery shopping for healthy food on a budget. Lately, it hadn’t been unusual for Brian & I to spend about $130/week on our groceries. Nuts, right?! We thought so & knew we HAD to do something to bring it down a some. Recently, I’d seen a lot in the fitness blogger world about the store Aldi. Well, to be honest, I’d never really thought much about Aldi… until Brian & I decided to go & give it a try.
On Friday afternoon Brian & I decided to do our weekly grocery shopping, starting at our local Aldi. We weren’t really sure what to expect & when we arrived & discovered the whole put a quarter in the cart to unlock it thing, well that was kind of neat & a smart way for them to save money. We also came prepared with our own re-usable bags since Aldi doesn’t provide any (another way for them to keep their costs down).
Well, going down the first aisle in the store, I was NOT impressed at all… nothing but junk, basically. Apparently, that was the crap food isle. I usually tend to do the method of sticking to the outer edge & outer isles of the grocery store, where all of the fresh whole & fresh foods are (produce, meats, dairy). I usually only try to venture into the inner isles for canned goods (beans, or baking ingredients, etc) & try to avoid all of the over-processed junk for the most part.
When I hit the jackpot was when I reached the produce. Hello, cheap, beautiful, healthy veggies & fruit! I was a happy camper. I found so many good, cheap things that it was tough to decide what to buy & if I could eat it before it’d spoil.
We also had success in the meat department with some pretty good looking inexpensive steaks. Haven’t tried them yet, but they looked good, so that’s another major score!
So what did we all get? Lots of good, healthy food!
We got: Steak (2 kinds), ground beef, bag of yellow onions, low-fat cottage cheese, cream cheese, radishes, bag of honeycrisp apples, zucchini, pack of multi-color bell peppers, baby carrots, brussel sprouts, green beans, can of artichokes hearts, peaches, strawberries, bananas, greek yogurt, celery, & salad.
Guess what?! It was all under $50!!!
This just proves that it IS possible & that you CAN eat healthy on a budget. You just need to know where/how to shop! Aldi has a lot of cheap, healthy, fresh foods (& frozen) – just shop the perimeter of the stores & stock-up on minimally processed canned items.
After our trip to Aldi, we had gotten just about everything we needed for the week, except for a couple of items. We’d wanted eggs, but weren’t sure if Aldi’s price was the best, so decided to head over to Target next door & see how much they were there. Turns out they were the same price. Oh well. So we added a few things at Target…
We got our eggs, some Italian Chicken Sausages, greek yogurts, PB, Luna Bar, & unsalted butter at Target. Most of these items were not necessities though, basically just the eggs were, which we could have gotten at Aldi for the same price.
I guess my point is that there are a lot of gripes about people not being able to afford to eat healthy, but I do think it’s possible if you know WHERE & HOW to shop. Places like Aldi make a great option to get some cheap, fresh produce, meats, frozen meats/veggies, & canned goods. Sure, I love to buy organic produce when I can, but it’s not always in the budget & I know that it’s not affordable for everyone. Hopefully, some day that will change.
- Do you have a grocery shopping budget & have trouble sticking to it?
- Do you shop at Aldi?
