Eating healthy is NOT expensive!
This is an excuse that people use to eat fast food all the time. Even a bodybuilder like myself with high protein needs can eat REALLY healthy food for $142 a week and that is eating almost all organic food. Probably the cheapest calories in the world come from fast food places like McDonalds. If I were to eat at fast food 3 meals a day it would probably cost me $15-$20 a day or $105 – $140 a week. Even the cheapest calories in the world at fast food restaurants are not that much cheaper than high quality organic products from the store. If I were to eat 3 meals a day at fast food, I would also get fat, weak, and unhealthy but thats kind of beside the point now.
Stop making excuses about your nutrition!!!
That is too expensive for me!
Some people say that $141 a week or $611 a month is expensive. Let me tell you what is REALLY expensive, obesity and diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Anything you can do to reduce the liklihood of these things is money well spent in my opinion. So you dont think you have $611 a month for high quality groceries, let me ask you this – how much a month do you spend on Starbucks coffee, restaurant meals, alcohol, beers with the friends, snacks from the gas station, protein powder, pre-workout drinks, and supplements? Try this, save your receipts for a month and then add them up at the end of the month. I am willing to bet that the $611 for quality groceries no longer seems so expensive. High quality food is the best supplement for muscle gain, fat loss, and health improvement.
The cost of cheap calories
Neglecting the health costs mentioned above that are caused by cheap calories, lets look at the cost of cheap and delicious calories – fat loss programs. Fat loss is a $20 Billion per year business in America and there are 45 million people who go on diets each year, this means that the average adult will spend $440 per year on dieting. Some people spend more money per year on dieting than they do on eating! If you eat cheap calories then don’t forget to budget for the diet you will have to go on.
Poverty, shopping, and health
There is one unfortunate thing I have glossed over here. To get these great prices on healthy food I had to drive my car to a big box store (Costco). There are a lot of people who can’t afford cars and have to rely on public transportation. For many of these people to get to a store like Costco would take hours on a bus and they simply cannot carry the groceries back. The reality is that people who dont have a lot of money are forced to buy the food that is near them and this is often the junk that is sold at convenience stores like 7-Eleven or at fast food places like McDonalds. There are people who are poor and KNOW what they should be buying and cooking but they simply do not have access to the ingredients they need to cook healthy food, lose weight, and get more fit.
If you know someone at work or at school who does not have a car and really seems to be trying to lose weight, get fit, and eat healthy, consider asking them if you can pick up some healthy things for them once a month at a big box store. Its good for karma points!!!! Things like a 25 pound sacks of dried pinto beans or a 25 pound sacks of rice can not only save a family hundreds of dollars a month but drastically improve their health when compared to eating junk food from convenience stores or fast food restaurants.