Both dieting and not, with my husband and I dieting together and not, we've been on tight and roomy food budgets. When there's room in the budget we go out to eat more, but otherwise, both healthy and not so healthy can be done cheaply or not.
I will say that dieting on a tiny budget sure does have it's unique challenges. Starches, sugars and fats are incredibly cheap. So cheap that it's very easy to eat way too many carbs on a very tight budget. Finding fruits, and vegetables and good sources of protein, can be more work. Not impossible, but more work, not only in finding the food but in preparing it. The cheapest foods are either ready to eat junk foods or foods that require more time in the kitchen to prepare.
To save money, hubby and I shop creatively. It takes alot more time than when we've had a larger budget, but it's just what we have to do. We start our shopping at a Big Lots type store that gets in health food store overstock (we've got to be careful here, because they also sell a lot of junk too and large candybars for a dime can be very tempting). Then we go to an oriental grocery store (lots of bargains here - gourmet soy sauce in larger bottles, but about half the price or less per ounce, bean sprouts much cheaper and much fresher than in the regular grocery store - but again a lot of snack products that are quite tempting). We stop at the health food store for dry tvp (soy crumbles). We brown the tvp with ground beef and save two ways. We can buy cheaper meat with a little more fat because the tvp has virtually no fat, and the tvp is about 1/3 the price per serving as very lean ground beef. TVP would be a better choice, but hubby doesn't like the taste of tvp on it's own - but likes it fine mixed with ground beef. We stop at a baking store that sells spices, flours, and grains much more cheaply than the grocery store (again a lot of tempting cheap stuff here too, as their biggest seller is frozen cookie dough balls in dozens of varieties and other "take and bake" treats). We have a Sam's Club membership that gives us additional savings on our medications (we paid $100 for it, but we saved that in just a couple months of medications). We buy some foods at Sam's Club, but again have to be careful there with the prices and with what we're buying (an awful lot of tempting prepared foods). We also shop Walmart, Aldi and a small privately owned IGA store (which is expensive overall, but has very good value on meats and produce). We also often buy a Sunday paper (but don't subscribe to the newspaper) for the grocery store ads, and if there are good enough sales will shop other grocery stores in town (although Walmart "matches" other grocery store ads if the exact price is listed - not 2 for 1 for obvious reasons).
We make a master grocery list, but it's flexible. If I wrote down cauliflower, and when I get to the store broccoli is on sale, we buy broccoli.
If my husband and I were working, it would obviously be more difficult to grocery shop like this (although we did something fairly similar when we both were working, there were just a couple fewer stores - and we spent more overall.) Because we're on disability it works for us, because we make small trips and bring home small packages from each store. To do a massive shopping once a month wouldn't work for us because we'd get worn out or have to shop one store and would have to hire someone to bring the groceries into the house.
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