Eating cheap

Hello, and welcome to Eating Cheap.

I’m Mike Young and this is my attempt to feed myself for as little as possible, and stay healthy while I do it. I hope this may be of use to you, too!

I’m a mechanical engineer-cum-software engineer on hiatus and traveling. I’m privileged enough to say I’ve never had a minimum wage job, and never really needed to deal with sorting through groceries to keep costs low.

Until now…

I’m still in a pretty good position. The job may be minimum wage but other costs (namely rent and utilities) are very low. I’m also starting this from a baseline of having no dietary restrictions, children, other dependents, or health problems. Consequently, that leaves me with time enough to dive into what I eat.

Health and nutrition

I am not a medical professional. I don’t intend to provide medical or nutritional advice. But I am good with numbers, and in a pinch I can put together tools to help sort the wheat from the chaff.

I aim to make it clear what’s my opinion, what’s my opinion with a basis behind it, and what’s a direct quote from literature. For the most part though – this is just my opinion. I’ll also make it very clear where AI has been used to search sources – and I will always link the underlying sources when possible.

I think it’s important to watch what you eat – but more importantly to read the labels. Lots of cheap food is low in calorie density and comprises mostly of water. Investigating labels and comparing prices is time consuming – and I assume most people on minimum wage don’t have that time. I aim to do some of that work for you, and possible help along the way.

Macros

I am not a nutritionist. I cannot advise anything other than speaking to a health professional about what you should be eating. With that said, I generally follow a high-fat diet – it personally makes me feel satiated for more of the day. It’s worth noting that at the same time I started upping fat and dropping carbs, it coincided with a generally healthier diet anyway. As ever – consult a professional if in doubt.

Meanwhile, though, foods are made up of three macro (main) components:

• Carbohydrates, or carbs – provide fast energy
• Proteins – Help build and maintain muscle, and can provide energy when other sources are not available
• Fats – Highly energy dense, slow to release

Each one has its place, and I consider it more important to look at the quality of the food rather than the pure content – 250 kcal of brown rice is likely to provide higher quality nutrition than 250 kcal of margarine.

Calorie counting

Is a major part of eating cheap. Over-eating means over-spending. There are a number of ways to know how many calories you should be eating – and it will serve you well to get a good baseline. Once you start counting you may be surprised at how calorie dense some foods are.

I had the good fortune to have a DXA [“Dexa”] scan 3 months ago. It’s absolutely not a requirement – but it was fun and quite interesting. From that, my estimated Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR – the amount of energy I need to exist) was calculated as 1,479 kcal. I add to that a rough baseline of 550 kcal for light activity and general walking, for a baseline of 2,140 kcal. If I do any strenuous work throughout the day – I’ll add more. For reference, I’m 175 cm tall and weigh 68 kg, a figure staying fairly constant.

Calorie counting can be done for free using a spreadsheet (or a piece of paper). It is much easier to use one of the variety of tracking apps – I can’t recommend any one in particular except that I use Cronometer which suits me well.

Beware – generic inputs on apps for foods may be alarmingly different to the label. If in doubt – trust the label where available.

Where from here?

I hope that gives a brief introduction of where I’m coming from. Over the course of this blog I’ll aim to look at the most cost and time-effective recipes for delivering nutrition. At the moment I’m in New Zealand, where the cost of groceries is high and the minimum wage is low – hopefully this is applicable to other countries.

At some point in the future I’d like to set up an app that scrapes supermarket websites for groceries and sorts out the cost-per-calorie, as well cost-per-<macro>calorie to help people sort brands and products to see what’s actually going to be cheaper, rather than cheapest per kilo.