
Let's face the facts here, kids: dieting isn't frugal. At first blush, this may seem to be counterintuitive. After all, if you're dieting, you are ostensibly eating less. If you're eating less, you're paying less for food, right?
If only it were so easy.
For a variety of reasons, my wife and I have decided to give the Paleo diet a shot (as appealing as a massive heart attack sounds, we think dieting is a better choice). If you're unfamiliar with this one, the idea is to eat foods that cavemen would have eaten. With this in mind, the focus is on fresh fruits, veggies, and meats, and we're supposed to avoid carbs, dairy, and various other sundry items that I'm still learning about (the diet is also surprisingly against beans and chili peppers ... does this make the diet racist?*).
In an effort to stock up on foods for the diet, on Monday night, my wife and I went to a local grocery store whose specialty is organic foods. I estimate that we probably only purchased enough food for 3-4 days, and it cost us approximately $120. Bear in mind, this is just enough food for the two of us; we don't have children or other family members that we need to feed.
Using the estimate above of $120 being enough to purchase food for two people for four days, a month of eating (rounded down to 28 days) will cost us $840. This assumes that we eat all meals at home.
Now, contrast that figure, if you will, with the cost of fast food for the same time period. If my wife and I had instead opted to go on the "Jack in the Box Value Menu" diet, I estimate that each meal would have cost us $8 ($4 for me, and $4 for her). If we assume three meals a day for 28 days, we come to a figure of $672, a figure nearly $170 less than what we're paying for fresh foods. That's over two grand a year!
One has to assume that the extra money that I'm spending now will be made up for in lesser medical costs in the future, but still! I want my extra bucks now! (Also, even though I'm not feeling really deprived so far on the diet, I could sure go for a stack of the awful and delicious Jack in the Box tacos right about now.)
I suppose part of the price difference comes from the fact that this was our first time trying to buy foods specifically for the diet. I anticipate that as the diet goes on, we'll get a little better at buying when things are cheaper, so I'm hoping that in the long run, our costs will go down.
For any dieters out there, how do you find a balance between buying healthy food and not spending a lot of extra money? Let me know in the comments.**
*In reality, I do kind of question this. In one of the books about the diet, it suggests that non-caucasian people tend to be lactose intolerant because they haven't had as much evolutionary time for their bodies to adjust to lactose, which seems to imply to me that the book's authors think non-caucasians are less evolved than caucasians.
**After I wrote this post, I remembered that
Annabelle over at Shopping Detox had already written a post about the frugality of the Paleo Diet. I'm still publishing my post though, because, you know, I'm a hack.
Photo by
Lauren Manning.
This post was featured in the
Carnival of Personal Finance #344 at Diva in Debt.