Food

How to Eat Healthy on a Tight Budget

It seems that everyone is feeling a financial pinch these days as the economy continues to sag. We’re all trying to save money any way we can, while keeping our fingers crossed that our jobs remain intact. One of the easiest targets in any budget-slashing enterprise is the grocery bill because it’s one of the most flexible expenses. But there is a tendency to forgo the healthiest items on our lists, such as fruits and vegetables, since they’re often the costliest. It’s not a good idea to sacrifice your health in order to save a few bucks, however, so here are some ideas for how to eat healthy on a tight budget.

I’ll admit that it takes a bit of work to eat healthy on a tight budget, but it absolutely can be done. If you’re committed to following through, then you can still buy the ingredients for hearty, wholesome, nutritious meals that won’t put too much of a dent in your wallet.

The first thing you have to do is forget about buying prepackaged foods. It’s no secret that consumers pay a premium for the convenience of bagged salads, heat-and-serve breakfast sandwiches, and the like. You can save lots of money each week by making your own salads and meals with fresh ingredients. Moreover, a key component in how to eat healthy is avoiding the preservatives that often go into prepackaged goods, so you’ll actually be killing two birds with one stone.

Another thing to do is to use coupons or stick to items that are on sale. This sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how few people take advantage of coupons anymore. Shopping this way does take some discipline, so be prepared to make frequent substitutions. If apples aren’t on sale this week, make do with oranges instead. If beef has been slowly creeping up in price, switch to turkey or chicken. Most people who know how to eat healthy on a tight budget are very strict about the sales-only rule. It really makes a difference!

And finally, if the option is available to you, consider joining a wholesale club such as Costco or BJ’s. In addition to the typical gallon jugs of ketchup these places are known for, they also sell meats and produce. If you have enough room in your freezer, you can stock up on lean cuts of beef, pork, or chicken, and simply defrost them when you’re ready to cook. Similarly, you can purchase discount produce — as long as you’re sure you can use all of it before it goes bad. Loading up on vegetables and then making a couple weeks’ worth of stews and casseroles to freeze is something lots of folks do.

These are just a few basic ideas for how to eat healthy on a budget. I know it’s tempting to simply stop off at McDonald’s or Burger King and order off the dollar menu on your way home from work, but you won’t be doing your waistline any favors that way. Your health is worth the extra effort!

Fatty Foods and winning the battle of the bulge

Throughout my youth I was skinny. Not just thin, not fit, but actually skinny. My friends used to joke that I looked unhealthy, and I couldn’t get near a dinner table without someone – usually an aunt or the mother of a friend or some such – trying to stuff me as full of potatoes, beef, and other fatty foods as was possible.

And I gladly indulged. Part of being skinny was a bottomless pit of an appetite, one that was particularly insatiable when it came to meat. Whether it was steak or hamburgers or fried chicken or pork chops, if it once was alive then I wanted to eat it. And to eat as much of it as I possibly could.

That was how I exited, culinarily speaking, from the time I hit puberty til the time I was twenty five. Fatty foods, and as much of them as I could find, was always the menu of choice.

Then, one day right around when I turned twenty five, my metabolism stopped. Overnight I went from six-foot-one, one-hundred fifty-five pounds to six-foot-one, one-hundred ninety-five pounds. It took maybe a month to pack on that weight, the first I had gained in over ten years. And it was ghastly.

Seriously, I had man boobs. Moobs. They jiggled when I walked up or down stairs. I began busting out of certain shirts I had worn forever. I couldn’t exercise – I never exercised growing up, so the prospect of doing so, now that I was grossly overweight, was just out of the question.

I had to improve my diet. And I really, really didn’t want to.

But making those choices, the tough choices that we really don’t want to make, is what makes us an adult. You get to eat all the fatty foods you want when you’re a kid, all the mashed potatoes, all the steaks, all the cheeseburgers with extra bacon, all the ice cream, all the anything, because you’re a kid. Your body can process tupperware at that age, for god’s sake.

But when you get older you have to be realistic. Everyone’s metabolism slows down one day, and the risk isn’t just weight gain. You’re also risking your health and your very life, and that’s something everyone should be willing to take into account.

So I cut out the fatty foods. Dairy was the first to go, and red meat soon followed. Desserts turned from ice cream or pastries to fresh fruit. And within a year, I had dropped twenty five of my new pounds.

Healthy Eating Plan

With the rising risk of obesity and poor-eating health related complications on the rise, our society is today bombarded with conflicting advice about healthy eating plans. As such, it becomes extremely challenging for a person searching for insight about the same to get the appropriate details. This raises the question; what exactly is a healthy eating plan?  It is simply a concise arrangement by a person to include healthy foods in his daily diet.

To formulate a healthy eating plan, one needs to know what constitutes healthy meals. For starters, fruits and vegetables should be a daily inclusion in all meals. Dieticians recommend that any person above five years of age should at least consume five portions of fruits and vegetables everyday. A portion is defined as 80 grams of any fruit or vegetable.

A healthy eating plan should also include at least five portions of cereals and whole meal foods. Foods from this group include oats, breakfast cereals, rice, pasta, noodles and whole meal breads. One can also consume Irish and sweet potatoes to compliment his or her diet.   A healthy eating plan should also include 2½ average servings of milk and other dairy products. Some of the healthy food choices in this category include yoghurt, cheese and skimmed milk. One should avoid the consumption of butter and dairy cream.

A healthy eating plan should also include food groups that are high in proteins. Such includes meat, fish and poultry. Eggs are also a healthy source of animal proteins but they should be consumed in moderation. When consuming animal proteins, it is always advisable for a person to plan on consuming foods that have low fat content. Alternatively, one can opt for animal proteins, which can be sourced from kidney beans and nuts.

Although there has been so bad comments going around about fats and sugars in the diet, it is important that every one realizes that they too have a vital role to play in the human body; they are the main source of energy. As such, a healthy eating plan should contain a healthy content of the same. To avoid the disadvantages that come from such foods, one should limit their consumption to a maximum of three servings a day.  To be on the safe side, one should plan to include unsaturated fats such as corn oil, sunflower and olive oil in their dietary plans. Saturated fats contained in animal products and highly processed foods should be avoided. When factoring in sugar in the diet plan, one should strive to include complex sources of the same. Foods containing highly refined sugars such as biscuits should be avoided.  Overall, a healthy eating plan should contain foods in the three basic food groups: proteins (body building foods), vitamins (mineral-rich foods) and carbohydrates (energy-giving foods). Fats are also a vital component in the eating plan.

Child Obesity – A Window into the Future, often, a Short Future

Does it seem to ring true? The claim, coming from extensive research done on thousands of children is that, a child who grows obese in childhood, is twice as likely as any normal child, to die by the age of 55, either through falling ill or through suicide. And not even a crazy situation like childhood diabetes or high blood pressure, can push a child close to catastrophe as much as child obesity can. If you like to read the New England Journal of Medicine, you’d see this study in a recent issue. What makes that study so compelling is that they took the trouble to pick thousands of children for their research, and to follow them for decades.

So, to have a child grow obese, isn’t something that can be taken care of later. If the child is obese now it will absolutely have effects on her life expectancy and health, 40 years later, even if she pulls herself together and loses weight by then. Of course, to late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians around the country, fat lazy kids have been a big source of cheap laughs for years; but it really is no laughing matter that one in three children in America falls in the overweight or obesity category if it will tell on their health decades from now. Something really serious in the body appears to get damaged by child obesity. And so, perhaps it is just as well that the first lady, Michelle Obama, is following up her campaign to get America to each more greens, with a campaign to end obesity in childhood.

The study actually took up and followed ten-year-old children who lived in Indian reservations, starting around the year 1945. They happened to pick American Indian children, because the obesity problem started out much earlier in that population than it did in the general American population. They kept following those very children until many of them began to die by the year 2000 of poor health. Plenty more were lost to alcoholism and drugs. This was not something that happened to the thin children as they grew up. Kids who suffered from child obesity, were more than twice as likely to die by 55; children with high glucose levels, were one-and-a-half times more likely to die by that age too.

How does this study help you help your child? If you take your child in to get looked over by a doctor, and he says that there isn’t much to worry about, because even if there is some weight trouble in evidence, all the tests for blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels checked out okay, you know that the doctor is wrong. Child obesity isn’t just bad because it makes children likely to be affected by those symptoms. Childhood obesity is just dangerous in and of itself. It may be easy to dismiss a study like this, pointing to how it was done on a different race of people altogether. But they found that American Indians in their health, always seem to lead the rest of the nation by a few decades. Studying this group, always gives scientists a window into the future.

When the Restaurant Counts the Calories Foods it Serves have, does it do a Good Job?

If the first thing you do at a restaurant when you’re handed a menu is count the calories foods on it have before you make up your mind, here’s some news for you. Researchers have been over the menus at several restaurant chains, and also the packaged frozen meals you find supermarkets – and would you be surprised to learn that they found that the labels on the packages and theon the menus, bore little connection to what was actually in those meals? If you’re finding yourself anxiously rushing (mentally) to defend those restaurants telling yourself that it’s really difficult to count every last calorie in every meal you make, think again. The FDA knows that too; it gives restaurant and frozen meal chefs a 20% window of safety. They won’t be considered in violation if their actual calorie counts are within the 20% overages allowed. There were some restaurant chains in the study that actually erred on the side of caution, and only overstated the calories foods they sold had.

These were well-known restaurant chains too, like Denny’s, Wendy’s and Domino’s. And the foods that the research chose to examine were all-American favorites, that weighed in at 500 calories or less. The grilled chicken wrap at Wendy’sthat was supposed to be 260 calories, had 30% more; a serving of grits at Denny’s that was supposed to be 80 calories had three times more, and at Lean Cuisine, a pasta meal had nearly 50% more than what was stated. Domino’s went the other way, and carried 30% less per slice of pizza. Perhaps the 20% window that the FDA grants them isn’t quite enough; these recipes aren’t put together by machines; a dollop more of butter on one particular order might easily send the energy content through the roof on it. Making sure that calories foods have keep to a certain level isn’t an exact science; cooking is an art after all.

And that isn’t the only danger on the minefield that is known as the food business. If a manufacturer states that a package contains 4 ounces of whatever, and the inspectors find that it only contains 3 1/2, they would be called on the carpet for it. The government takes a very serious view on shortchanging customers on weight. So, manufacturers carry on the tradition of the baker’s dozen – an expression from old world England, where the King had some pretty exotic punishments announced for bakers who sold less than they promised. So to be able to keep their heads, bakers would just throw in an extra loaf with every dozen sold, just to err on the side of caution. Just to make sure that no one can ever accuse them of selling people short, packaged food companies throw in a little extra in each package. This might save them from the wrath of the food shortchanging committee, but when it sends the calorie count up, they will find themselves in trouble again. And an additional problem in keeping a handle on the calories foods contain, comes from the concept of the free side dish at restaurants. The side dishes can often contain more calories than the main entrée itself. And often, it doesn’t get counted.

Basically, businesses keep serious and on the level, if the government requires them to; things seem to be shaping up for that in the ready-made foods business.

High allergy foods

Chris Rock has a pretty hilarious stand-up routine about high allergy foods, and how allergy foods are something that can happen only in the western world where we have such abundance that our bodies can actually reject certain sources of nutrition. As he put it, “Do you think anyone’s running through Ethiopia saying ‘I can’t have dairy, I’m lactose intolerant!’?” Unlikely, and keenly observed on his part.

However, with apologies to Mr. Rock, it’s a simple fact that the human body has evolved to process certain foods more efficiently than others. Lactose – milk and milk-based products – are a good example. If you look in nature, you’ll see that mammals generally stop weaning by the time they’re the human equivalent of four years old. Generally we stop weaning our kids well before that, yet as a society we still drink milk and have milk products (generally cow’s milk) much later in life. This in spite of the fact that we are not really evolved to do so.

The side effects of high allergy foods like dairy are easy to see. Humans simply absorb more fats from these foods than we would from other foods of similar nutritional value – vegetable oils come immmediately to mind in that regard. Both cow’s milk are high in fat, but your body extracts the good fats from olive oil much more easily and readily than it does from cow’s milk. Your body also burns those calories easier, and generates more energy from vegetable oils than it would from a similar amount of dairy calories.

Now, to be clear, this is actually more of a food “intolerance” than a food allergy. We are evolved to process certain foods better than others, and the “others” can cause an adverse reaction that’s more of a nuisance than a legitimate medical problem.

An allergy is a serious medical problem, but one that effects a far smaller number of people than food intolerances. While as many as 45% of adults have some form of lactose intolerance, it’s estimated that only one to three percent of the population suffers from a legitimate food allergy foods.

Most common among high allergy foods are wheat and gluten, as well as various allergies to various types of nuts. My niece is among those with a peanut allergy, for example, and in her case even though it’s a relatively minor allergy, it’s still good policy to bring an epi-pen just in case she’s exposed to something that triggers a reaction.

Eating a low fat diet

If you want to drop weight and get healthy, then one of the best things you can do for yourself is eat a low fat diet. It’s an especially good idea now, with spring and swimsuit season approaching, to reconsider what you’re eating and when, as not only can you have positive health effects, but you can improve yourself aesthetically as well.

And the good news is that eating a low fat diet is actually pretty easy. You have to avoid things like dairy, red meat, and desserts of all kinds. So eating a low fat diet does mean you’ll have to give up some of the tasty treats we all love, but improved physical and mental health are a more than ample payoff for such sacrifices.

So here’s some advice on how to eat a low fat diet.

First, clear out your refrigerator and pantry. Get rid of all the stuff that is high in fat, but more importantly, get rid of the stuff that’s high in transfats and saturated fats. Believe it or not there are some fats (like Omega 3 fatty acids) that are good for your health. However, transfats and saturated fats are anything but. So go through your foodstores with a fine-toothed comb and get rid of anything that doesn’t fit the bill for your new low fat diet.

Once you’ve finished clearing out the ice cream and cookies, it’s time to restock your pantry and fridge with healthy ingredients. This means fresh fruits and vegetables, bread that’s not made with high fructose corn syrup, and a focus on whole grains like quinoa or oats.

Another good bit of advice is to cut back on your servings of meat. Even low-fat meats like chicken or fish are higher in fat than vegetables, and a nice three bean soup, or brown rice and lentils, can be just as hearty and filling as any sort of meat.

You’ll also want to drink plenty of liquids, namely water. Proper hydration maintains kidney function, and it’s your kidneys that process all the junk out of your system. Even when eating a low fat diet, you’ll be taking in waste that your kidneys need to dispose of. So give them all the help they need and drink plenty of water every day. Also, this has the added benefit of filling you up a bit so you’ll eat less in the first place.

Are you Addicted to Food?

Its movie night in your household and you find yourself eating a bowl of popcorn and craving another bowl. You pause the movie and make yourself another bowl of the buttery snack. Are you addicted to food? It’s highly unlikely; you may just love the taste of popcorn. However, if you find yourself eating a bowl of popcorn and then a bowl of ice cream, followed by some cookies and potato chips, you may be addicted to food. Believe it or not, being addicted to food is a very common disorder. While it has always existed, it has only become more acknowledged and studied in recent years.

There are tons of reasons behind being addicted to food. And, there are many different ways that people are addicted to food. Perhaps it is the compulsion that races through you and makes you feel like indulging in those comforting foods or maybe it’s the paranoia of gaining weight that makes you want to avoid any forms of foods. All of those trains of thought are forms of being addicted to food. Being addicted to food is actually simply defined as an obsessive preoccupation with food. That compulsion could easily lead to a variety of eating disorders. Most people think of bulimia and anorexia as the only forms of eating disorders. And, those same individuals probably don’t have a clue that those people who struggle with those eating disorders actually are addicted to food. They may not be addicted to food in the same manner that a person defined as an overeater would be. Those people who struggle with bulimia and anorexia are obsessed with food – just in a different way than those who indulge in overeating. Perhaps it is a way to gain some sort of control in their out of control lives. It may be very well hidden or it may be blatantly obvious to people around them. Most likely, a large amount of those who would be defined as being addicted to food are either blatantly obvious or incredibly secretive about it.

There is help for those who are addicted to food. It isn’t simply as easy as going on a diet. There is typically an underlying reason for being addicted to food. Whether it is about control, or feeling out of control in life, or there is another reason for the addiction, it needs to be treated the same way that other addictions are treated. The underlying reason needs to be uncovered and dealt with in a healthy and positive manner. If you struggle with being addicted to food, do yourself a favor and seek some help in treating this common problem. If you know someone who struggles with being addicted or obsessed with food – whether it be overeating or lack of eating, do them a favor and see if you can make a difference in their lives. It may not be welcomed from them, at first, but you could be the one who is credited with their future turning point.