Buying Groceries on a Budget

Many families in the United States have to do their grocery shopping on a tight budget. The rising prices of essentials, like food and gas, only make it more difficult to stay within a budget each month. The tips below have proven to be helpful in saving money at the grocery store:

Get the best nutrition for your buck. When money is tight, skip the chip and soda aisles, which have little nutritional value. Go back to simple foods, such as skim and low-fat milk, eggs, beans, lean beef, whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts give you the best nutrition value for the money you put into them. 

Start cooking at home. Planning your meals is going to be the best use of your time. Use grocery store ads to plan your menus around what's on sale. However, think good nutrition, not just cheap food when meal planning.
Consider investing in a deep freezer. Having a full-size freezer allows you to buy food in bulk and stock up on sale items. This also allows you to cook a lot of food at one time and to prepackage foods into single servings for the entire family. Nevertheless, buying food in bulk is only beneficial if you will actually use it.

Plant a garden. You do not need a lot of land to grow your own food. You can grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, etc in pots in a full light window or outside on a patio. The more you grow, the less vegetables you have to buy at the store in the summer and fall. 

Lifestyle Changes

Nutrition Tip: Take your time in this challenge. Good nutrition needs to be a lifestyle change, something you follow the rest of your life. Don’t make the mistake of trying to change everything overnight. Remember it took your life thus far to adopt your current eating habits; it will take a time to change them. When you make a change, focus on reaching a week or two doing it, then review how you have been doing and look into how you can improve. Many small changes lead to bigger and better changes. That is how you reach a goal.  

 

Fitness Prescription: Walk 30 minutes. Doing at least 30 minutes of activity most days of the week (4-5 days) is the goal. Continue to walk and add in a variety of exercises to your workout routine. Keeping physically active is the key to losing weight and keeping it off.

 

You can do this. This is the last daily email of the Cynergy Health Challenge; however, we will continue to email you weekly throughout the challenge. Never hesitate to email or call us with any questions or to make any appointments.

 

As of this date, we have a collective weight loss of 31 lbs! (That is only counting the one-sixth of the participants who have done a second weigh-in so imagine what our weight loss really is!) Keep it up!