“I’d like to be at a healthier weight,” a friend told me. “But we just don’t have the money to buy expensive diet foods and there isn’t enough in the budget to join a gym.  I’m stuck!”

Many folks feel that way — that a healthy diet and exercise plan is out of reach because of expense.  Don’t despair! We’ll be looking at ways to make healthy choices on a shoestring budget in this series of blogs.

Let’s take a look at the grocery list first.  You don’t need to buy the pricey pre-prepared “diet foods.”   In fact, I’d advise skipping the convenience foods altogether.

Back in the early 1970s when I started housekeeping, 90% of the food I bought were ingredients.  Very few things were pre-processed.  Now the numbers have flipped and 90% of the food you find in the store is convenience food.  That’s a bad thing for several reasons.

Quick foods like boxed “just add hamburger” meals, or freezer meals ready for the microwave have had the fiber removed to make it faster to prepare.  Take a look at the label on that box.  It likely will have low numbers listed under “fiber” and similarly low numbers in the nutrients category.  The lower fiber usually makes the food higher glycemic, because fiber takes longer to digest.  The  low fiber meal is digested and the sugar is dumped into your bloodstream in a flash.  This results in an insulin dump — and insulin signals your body to store fat.  It’s not just the calories in the processed food that pack on the pounds, but the type of calories and the message they send.  Besides that, your body is starved for nutrients.  You will be driven to eat more to try to make up for the low quality of the food you are eating.

And then there are the chemicals the producers add to the quick meals to make them palatable.  Otherwise, the stuff would taste like cardboard and you wouldn’t bother with it.  These chemicals may be addicting and certainly aren’t good for your health.

The answer?  Buy whole ingredients and skip the expensive, low nutrition, processed foods.   Do the cooking yourself and you will have control over what is in your food — and it will cost less, too.  Look for low glycemic recipes, and be sure to share with us the ones that are least expensive and best tasting.  I’m always looking for recipes to post.

More coming up about inexpensive, low glycemic food choices and ways to make healthy cooking convenient.

Eating to live an living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown