A great way to save money, improve your health, and possibly even lose weight is to cook at home rather than eating fast food or dining out. There are many excellent, delicious, and healthy meals you can make for very little money. Even if you don’t think you have many cooking skills, there are a lot of meals that are easy to make.
Yes, I know how much easier it is to go out and pay someone else to fix your food. But when money is tight, for the price of a fast food meal or a meal at even a moderately priced restaurant, you can buy enough food to fix several meals at home. Even if you can only cook simple meals, simple meals can be quite tasty.
This isn’t a fast fix, though. You may be used to buying overpriced food at the grocery store that has empty calories and therefore is neither nourishing nor, ultimately, tasty. And food manufacturers know a lot about the psychology of food and food packaging, as well as how placement of food in the grocery store affects buying habits and impulse buys, so you will have to take charge. Educate yourself about what foods are good for you. Find out what is really healthy and what is just hype. Find out what you truly like versus what you might have been eating because you always did, or your mom served it to you, or it is easy.
On the way to better eating, take a look at SuperFoods Rx, the SuperFoods Rx Diet, and SuperHealth. Okay, so the authors are making a franchise of it, but what they have to say is well-researched and simple to remember. To summarize their message, there are foods and food families that are filled with so many good things for us that they practically constitute medicine. And you don’t even have to purchase these books; your local library almost certainly has them for you to check out. You don’t have to read every little detail in these books either; just look at the summaries at the start of the chapters, make your own lists based on them, and you are good to go.
In my next two posts, I will be addressing some other food-related ways to save money, and I may include a few of my favorite recipes while I am at it.
