Evolution Trail - Eating well for less

Reminiscing on our £25 a Week Challenge

We recently bought to an end our "Eat Healthy for £25 a Week" challenge, although Andrew has decided it would be cheating to buy in bulk and not go longer term, so he is still on it…he's weird that guy. He's even thinking of sticking to something similar! Overall, the challenge was a great deal of fun, taxing at times and it was certainly interesting to see our different approaches to it. For those of you who may be looking to eat healthier on a budget, we've put together some of our top tips that we've learned this week (or month in Andrew's case)

This is a controversial topic in any "cheap food" challenge. Of course, if you go out and spend £200 bulk buying for a weeklong challenge, that sort of diminishes the point of the challenge. Similarly, if your goal is to simulate poverty, spending an amount that someone struggling on a week-to-week basis will virtually never have available to them for food spend seems a little disingenuous.

Our goal was never to try and simulate abject poverty. Andrew, especially, in the past has been extremely critical of celebrities and diet "experts" peddling organic and other high price options to people who are barely feeding their family as it is, so the goal of the challenge was more around giving those who have the choice to maybe eat better, or more cheaply, some ideas to do so.

Bulk buying is one of the first options which may be available. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a Costco or other such Cash and Carry card, this can be an option to bring down price if you're willing to buy in large quantities. Another option, one Andrew's a big fan of, is Muscle Food. Muscle Food do "Buy a Box" options which allow you to fix your spend and still get particularly good value on your meat. The picture below came in at £75 total and contained no less than 10 steaks of various kinds, 5kg of chicken, free range mince and a whole host of variety.

Yup…should last a week. We're 3 weeks on since this picture was taken and we're barely halfway through.

This bulk buying has led to meat portions being between 60p and £1.50 in price…steaks are still expensive. On a £3.57 a day budget, that allows quite a bit of play.

One of the downsides of being on a very tight budget is that it's extremely mentally taxing and can be extremely easy to take the simple path. This leads many down the path of readymade meals, an unvaried and often unhealthy diet and, often, more expense that if necessary.

You can track in any number of ways. We would recommend a meal-tracker such as MyFitnessPal in order to track both your calorific intake and your macros. One of Elaine's goals for this challenge was to have a minimum of 100g of protein a day, Andrew was trying to make sure that he hit 1750 kcal a day because he was already on a large cut and not making that goal could have consequences.

As far as tracking the expense, much of this will be down to where you shop. Many supermarkets have an app which allows you to keep digital receipts and so you can see exactly how much was spent. In addition, one of the biggest pieces of advice to anyone looking to monitor their diet is GET FOOD SCALES!! As human beings, we are incredibly terrible at "eyeballing" food weight. Often grossly underestimating how much we've put in food. If I told people to show me a portion of butter which weighed 10g, I believe most people would be closer to 25g that 10g and in calorie-rich food that can be the difference between meeting your goals and missing them. It also will make your food go further.

Many may scoff at the low-end supermarkets such as Aldi and Lidl and point out that while Sainsburys, Waitrose and others do charge you more, the quality of what you're buying is much higher.

While there is a grain of truth to this, for items which are "in fashion" such as healthy grains and nuts, such as Quinoa, Pine Nuts etc you will pay a double premium for shopping in these supermarkets. The best example we found was that Quinoa, a superfood grain which Andrew has a disturbingly close relationship with, was £3.50 for a 500g bag in one of the higher end supermarkets putting it at 42p per serving. In Lidl, a 300g bag of Quinoa costs 89p, putting the cost of a serving at just under 18p per serving. Much more appetising. The same is true for nuts and other fruit. When you're on a budget, unless the food is provably massively inferior, you cannot justify spending twice as much money for the same item. This price disparity also contributes to the myth that certain healthy foods are not affordable. It's more likely that many aren't willing to swallow their pride and shop somewhere other than their beloved status symbol. Now, there is a caveat here. We're not saying that you should go to 5-6 different outlets to save pennies on something. That is maybe an option for someone with infinite time but, realistically, this will not work for everyone. So, what we'd recommend is find 2-3 outlets, be they online or otherwise and stick to them. Best bang for buck.

When looking into budget, the first thing that pops into most people's heads is "Pasta, Oats and Rice" and this isn't without merit. With Pasta costing approximately 9p per portion and Oats being even cheaper, these are certainly a staple of any budget diet, but they can be varied up.

However, when we're able to do a little thinking there are some real crackers, we've been able to do and, as a reminder, none of these meals cost over £2.

The last item is particularly helpful as soup, certainly for Andrew, became a big part of how he approached this. With a pressure cooker or Instant Pot in tow, making 4 lunches for the week in 30 minutes became possible which avoided the classic thoughts of slaving over a hot stove. Combined with some batch cooking, spaghetti bolognaise making enough for 2,3 or 4 meals and freezing, the ease of maintaining a budget came as well.

There was even room for treating ourselves a little if we did well enough as Andrew discovered at the end of week 1. Chocolate, of the dark variety, was also seen during the challenge.

5) This may be more difficult for some that others - Sorry Menfolk.

One of the downsides of being male is that, on average, men require more calories to sustain themselves than women do. There was disparity on this challenge with the extreme sides being Andrew and Elaine. With Elaine being somewhere between 1200 and 1400 kcal a day and Andrew's goal being 1750-1900 on a cut there is obviously an exceptionally large difference in terms of how both of us had to structure ourselves in this challenge. It would, obviously, be way worse if Andrew wasn't on a cut currently.

Elaine's overall feeling was that this wasn't a huge challenge to her, and she could possibly have reduced the weekly cost to £20. This may not fit in for marathon training as the calorie requirements rise with training but it's certainly something to consider during the off season, although we're not convinced Elaine knows what one of those is.

For Andrew, this meant adding nut butter to places where possible, increasing portions of oats and pasta to allow more food denser in kcal/£ without breaking the budget. However, there's only so much you can do with porridge and over the long term we can see boredom setting in. When we all discussed this on a wrap-up call, Andrew was, however, optimistic. He stated that while £25 a week was probably going to be difficult long-term; it wouldn't need a large increase to see a substantial increase in variety of food maybe as little as another £5 per week for someone on a 23-2500 kcal per day requirement. So, he'll be trying that for a while.

Overall, all 3 of us managed to eat well and stay within budget for the duration. There is certainly some optimisation to be done, however we can save that for another time.

Hopefully, these tips have helped, and you can always just look at the food if you're hungry, feel free to contact us on Facebook or by e-mail for some recipes if you're lacking motivation.

Stay Safe All and Happy Trails!