Hi everybody, Kris Stokes with Custom Fitness Personal Training Studio. Today we’re talking about Better Nutrition On A Budget. This is part two of this series, so if you didn’t catch part one, feel free to go back and grab that. But be sure and be on the look out for part three as well because it’s going to give you that many more great things.
In part one we discussed that being on a budget doesn’t necessarily have to be a financial strain. Sometimes people are on a budget because they don’t have enough income to make their life what they would like for it to be. Other times, it’s just that we’re on a budget because we’re trying to make things more efficient and to get more value out of what we’re doing. Whichever way you end up on that spectrum, for whatever reason that you’re on a nutrition budget, pretty much all of us are and should be, kind of focused on making sure that we’re getting the most out of what we’re doing.
The first video on this, we went over three great tips on how to save money when you’re looking at food and how to make it more valuable to what you’re doing. Let’s look at three more today.
Convenience Costs, Every Time..
Number one is that convenience costs, every time. It doesn’t matter. I always tell people, you either will spend your time or you’ll be spending your money, and that’s on anything that you do in life. What goes into your checking account will show your priorities, from highest to lowest, every time. Because we end up needing to focus our efforts in one of those two directions. Whenever it comes to food, I hear two different sides. I hear, things about people not sticking to this plan because it was too much food prep. I also hear, “we couldn’t stick to this plan because it costs too much”. Both sides you’ve got give and take there.
Convenience will cost, every time. Whether that is precut, pre-sliced, processed or packaged. Everything in that scenario is basically you paying someone else to do it. So, my best suggestion, if you’re looking to save some money, is to cut out the convenience. Packaged, pre-sliced, precut, process, cut it all out. And instead of taking a 12 or 24 hour period, whatever it may be to do food prep all alone and stand in your kitchen by yourself and do this, I say, get the family involved. Get your spouse involved. Get your kids involved.
My kids love helping chop up vegetables and getting them ready for the week. They love getting to help create ants on a log or other snacks that they can have during the week. I get them involved. I have them help so that we’re not going crazy because, it used to, whenever I tried to be a one man band and get it all done, it would take me a full two days on the weekend to get it done. Keep in mind, I usually work six days a week. So, when I’m working that much and I get home and I have to do that for two days worth, literally, at least 24 hours, it’s too much. So, I got the family involved and now we’re able to work together on that when we have those food prep days.
Meal Panning
Alright, number two is an important one that not a lot of people like to do. It’s meal planning. People don’t usually like to do it because it takes time. I’m going to give you my shortcuts here. The reasons that you would want a meal plan is because it helps you to buy only what you need instead of just picking something up because you’re used to having it in your pantry. It helps you to organize your meals so that you can make things, say in a week long period, that have similar ingredients so that that way you’re not buying celery for this, and then you let the rest of the celery go bad. But instead, you got celery for one meal and then maybe a few days later you add that celery into another meal. You’re using similar ingredients to be able to short on the waste and be able to save money and value of what you’ve purchased.
Here are my little tips for meal planning. We’ve talked over these in the past, maybe you’ve heard them, maybe you haven’t. With meal planning, basically, what I do is I try and write out four meal plans, four weeks worth, and I write them each on a different sheet. I don’t run them all on the same page. Each on a different sheet. I write out breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks in between. And that’s for me, the kids, my husband, all of it throughout the week. Then I put those in a notebook, so that way then I tie a grocery store list to that list.
Now yes, it sounds like a lot of work in the beginning. And the very first day it took a little bit of work to get all that done. But it makes my life a breeze now, because now I have a grocery list tied to that meal plan. This meaning that the next time that I come back to that meal plan, because I do, I just rotate through them. Then all of a sudden I already have that grocery list made. All I have to do is go to the pantry and mark off which ones I’ve already got so I don’t pick that up and I go to the store and get whatever else is left. Super, super easy. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Then, as we find new recipes, I make a new meal plan, make a new list, then we go from there. It’s not good to eat the same foods every day. You don’t want to have the same meal plan every week, but, have them four or five, six of them, and as you go and build new recipes into it, you get a full notebook full of them and I just keep rotating through and tie those grocery lists in so it makes life easier. Maybe you can steal an idea from that and be able to use some of that to make your life better.
Know When to Buy In Bulk
Alright, tip number three on Better Nutrition On A Budget, is to learn when to or not to buy in bulk. So, there’s a story that comes with this. Back whenever I lived in apartments, back in college, we had a Sam’s card. We’d go to Sam’s and buy all this lovely food, because you could, and it was so much cheaper per piece than what it would be at another place. Problem is, when you live in an apartment there’s nowhere to put that much food. I’d have food in the living room, in the bathroom, in the kitchen and in the dining room. There was nowhere to put all those packages. Eventually, I became smart and figured out that it was actually a waste of my money to do that because it was leading to more frustration and I would have to throw away something in order to make room for that.
What we want to do is, we want to make sure that we want to buy things that won’t go bad in bulk. If you’re getting bulk, those are things that won’t go bad. Your frozen foods, your nuts, even your toiletries, all that kind of stuff, obviously. But your frozen foods and nuts, things like that, that aren’t going to go bad.
Whereas, your produce, if you’re buying that in bulk, you’re going to typically end up throwing it away. You’re not even going to use half of it because it’s just going to sit there and it’s probably not even gonna get to be refrigerated. I even have to be careful sometimes whenever I go to United in the middle of the summer. That’s when the produce is so nice and I tend to pick up way too much produce and then we’re juicing for days to get rid of all of it so that it’s not just sitting on the counter. We want to make sure that, if it’s something that’s going to go bad quickly, that we don’t buy that in bulk. Instead, we just buy what we need.
Alright, those are my three tips for today. Watch out for the next video, part three on this series of Better Nutrition On A Budget.
New Program: Transform In Four
Remember that we are starting a new program. Custom Fitness, the home of Mini Me, Meltdown, Downsize, whichever program that you’ve heard of or participated in the past, we have done amazing things for a lot of people through these programs. Every time that we finish a program, we take it, we rebuild it, and take in the information gathered from that program. It’s basically our way of doing research to find out what’s working and what works better.
We’ve taken all of that information now, we created this new program called Transform In Four that will be starting here in just a few weeks. I’m just interested in getting the word out, want to find out if maybe you’re interested in learning more about it. I just wanted to get the word out today that we are going to be starting that here in a few weeks and we’re going to be taking a limited number of participants. We always do. We like the one on one approach. We really like being able to know who’s in each program and keep you accountable and walk with you through this process, rather than just handing you papers and walking away.
We also like to be able to make sure that everything is running smoothly. If we get too many people in a program, sometimes kinks happen and we can’t always figure out why. We keep it very minimal just to make sure that it’s more personalized, more customized to you. So if you’d like more information about Transform In Four, feel free to give us a call, (806) 322-3188, or you can leave us a message here and we’d be happy to respond to you, get some answers to your questions.
Hope you have a great day! Now go work on that meal planning.