Ballin’ on a Budget

Oh the struggles of wanting to be healthy but not being able to afford it, or having to sacrifice health and fitness goals to be able to eat. Unfortunately, trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle is quite far from being cheap. However, it is possible to keep up your fitness goals while keeping your bank account in the positives. This blog post is aimed at those who want to keep achieving their fitness goals but might not have the cash flow to provide themselves with adequate groceries, or those that would simply like to start saving money at the grocery store.

Ballin’ on a Budget:

This blog is going to provide you with a scenario that gives a VERY BASIC example of how to ball out on a tight budget.

• We are going to have a grocery limit of $200
• This $200 limit is supposed to last an entire month (if not, more)
• We will balling out at Wal-Mart aka “Ball-Mart”
• Except our Whey Protein (Syntha-6 5lb jug – 48 servings). We are ordering the protein shake off Amazon for a steal price.
• There will be examples for both Vegetarian and non-vegetarian situations

A few things to keep in mind is that these are not exact prices and each given scenario will be different for different people. These Wal-Mart prices might be different than your Wal-Mart prices, and you might have to use other grocery stores in order to fulfill your list. Also, since this is very basic it is good to know that if you would like to go organic with anything, it is going to cost more. Fruit & Vegetable prices are based off organic prices (since that is the safer and healthier route) but organic dairy and poultry will cost a lot more. There are also a few products like fruit that will probably need to be bought twice in a month, if not more so those have been accounted for. Lastly, using this list month after month gets old quick (trust me) so be ready so season and sauce just about everything.

Oh yeah I am not a vegetarian so if any of this strays from the guidelines, I apologize, but there are some great sites and professionals that list some amazing healthy vegetarian alternatives. Again, this is extremely basic but can be considered practical as it stays pretty healthy and any health nut or fit freak can still get their “macros”. The totals come within a dollar of each other and there is even enough left over for a little weekend fun money.

The beauty about this list is that you can play around with quite a bit, especially since we still have fifty dollars left over. For example, fruits can be switched out or added (like oranges) or the addition of red meats and other fish to get a more diverse diet. Diet and nutrition is truly all about trial and error so my goal for this is to hopefully provide a sense of direction to save money. What works and what doesn’t work will be up to you to decide, but it is nice to know that it is possible to maintain a fit lifestyle at a relatively low cost.