What foods are you eating? Let’s take an economic approach to your food habits
Do you put your money where your mouth is?
If I asked you what you ate last Thursday, could you tell me? Probably not.
Some of you might know the answer if I asked, “What are you eating today?”
And no surprise. Unless you are in the throws of some rabid diet plan, what we eat (our food pattern) runs largely on autopilot. Each one of us has our existing day-to-day methods of obtaining food and eating it. Many of them are learned in childhood.
These automatic food habits are both a blessing and a curse when it comes to our health and wellbeing. It all depends on whether those habits fall on the “healthy” or “unhealthy” part of the food spectrum.
Now before you bail thinking this is just me about to tell you that writing down everything you eat is somehow going to change your life, wait a second. . . I have a different approach for you, one that hits you right in the pocket book.
Your food bills can tell you more about the right and wrong of your autopilot food habits than recording that 8oz fruit juice you chugged down or the 3.5 servings of vegetables you ate dinner.
What foods are you eating shouldn’t be a mystery. Let’s dive in.
This is your diet on autopilot
As a self-proclaimed Foodie, I probably spend more time thinking about food than the average person. Some might consider me food obsessed. Even still, I enjoy a glass of soda pop, a fast store-bought flatbread, or even a salty bag of chips from time to time. I’m not here claiming to be perfect.
We all need to eat. We all make choices every single day about what we are eating or snacking on. And yet, in so many ways the food we eat has simply become a routine we don’t think about.
When I want a fast dinner I load up some nacho chips with onions, cheese and peppers, and eat them with salsa. When I want comfort food on a cold evening, I make a hearty soup or stew. When I need a fast breakfast I grab a bagel. We all have these kinds of patterns - our no-brainer, go-to foods.
And while you can sit down with a notebook and record every sip and bite, the faster solution with a bigger OMG impact on your brain, is to start keeping your grocery and food bills and tally up what you actually buy. That is a reality check most of us need from time to time. Not our ideals. Not our lofty healthy food goals. But what actually makes it from the store shelf into your kitchen.
Nothing says WTF louder than discovering that you spent more money on fast food or pub meals than you did on fruits and vegetables. Or that your total spending on snacks is higher than what you spent on cheese, meat, dairy or your personal go-to healthy staples.
What your food bills are trying to tell you
What you spend your food dollars is literally putting your money where your mouth is.
Starting today or at the beginning of a month for simplicity, keep every receipt from the food you buy. Anything that is food. Toss them in an envelop and process them all at once at the end of the month, or jump right in and record the details on a spreadsheet.
You want to dissect these bills just enough to answer some key questions like:
- Where do you spend the most money on food?
- How much do you spend on junk food vs healthy food?
- How much do you spend eating out vs cooking at home?
- And if you did buy fresh food – how much did you actually eat vs tossing into the garbage because you forgot to use it? (a bit of a side-track, but worth asking).
You can take this as far as you want in terms of details.
If you are really trying to “fix” your food habits, than a full on assessment of categories like fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy, meat, deli, ready-made meals, and so on can give you an even deeper perspective.
Because pretty much without fail, those ready-made meals are costing you more than if you made it yourself.
Canned soups are a prime example. Soup used to be a pretty cheap and easy meal just a couple of years ago. My favorite soup is now way over $4 a can and is less hearty in the bowl. Lose-lose scenario buying soup now. When a quick run through the produce section of the store and an hour on the stove results in easy veggie soup that is packed with nutrients and enough to feed you today, tomorrow and put some in the freezer.
Check-out Tip
If you do want to take the deep dive on your food bill, it is WAY easier if you group your items at the checkout so they show up all together on the receipt. Then all you need is a pen to draw a line between the groups and you can quickly tally up the categories.
But you can just use proportions instead of $
If it seems like too much trouble to do the math, you can still get a pretty good feel for where your dollars are going just by comparing overall amounts.
By source
You can save all your food receipts and look at how many times you shopped at the grocery store vs ate out. Or you can looks at the total of all the grocery receipts vs the total of all eating out receipts. This can show you where you spend most of your food dollars.
By category
You can also look at the bill and ask how many items on the bill are healthy vs not healthy, or fresh vs processed, or for make your own meals vs pre-made.
For example using the ‘by category’ method, if you bought apples, bananas, tomatoes and lettuce (4 fresh foods), 6 frozen dinner entrees (premade), and 2 juices, 2 pops and 1 water (5 drinks), then you could say :
- 4/15 was fresh (27%),
- 6/15 was premade (40%), and
- 5/15 were drinks (33%).
You can split or group the items in any way that make the most sense for your current food habits or the questions you are trying to ask. While it doesn’t take into account the costs of each item or group, it does show you how you spend your money (which might convince you to take the deeper dive and just do the math).
Why knowing the $$$ works
Data has a way of changing our minds the way simple arguments cannot.
We all KNOW that eating healthy is the right thing to do if we want to avoid disease and pain and live longer.
But knowing this is rarely enough for us to choose to get up and cook a meal instead of popping some frozen food into the oven or microwave when we’re tired.
Counting the dollars, however, can reveal how these choices are impacting the rest of our lives. When food on autopilot has us eating out multiple times a week and spending way too much on fast pre-made meals, suddenly it is a LOT easier to rethink our food, health and money situation.
It can also become very motivating if you tell yourself that the money you don’t spend on eating out or take-out can be spent on something you’re saving up for – like a holiday, or that special something you’ve had your eye on.
This food habit overview was a game changer for me.
I sat down with this receipt exercise when food prices started spiking last year. One of the things that I noticed was just how much my addiction to sparkling water was costing me. Now carbonated water is not particularly unhealthy, but I drank a LOT of it. LOVED it! But the cost had tripled and this is clearly something that I could drop without significant consequences.
I had to ask myself why I was drinking so much carbonated water over tap water. It came down to taste. I experimented a bit and found that a fresh lemon slice in my water solved my objection to tap water. The result was 100% savings and no bottle recycling to do by making the switch (the lemon is compostable).
Not everything is that simple. But we get so easily sucked into patterns that every now and then the money cross-check on your food bill is a worthy exercise to prove to yourself you really are doing everything to eat healthy or .. . . well, you’ve slipped into habits that are undermining the very thing you say you want.
You Get What You Pay For – maybe?
Ironically, our focus on making food easy and deleting food preparation from our to-do lists often costs double or triple what that same food would cost to just go ahead and make yourself. And many times the supposed time savings are non-existent.
Cake mixes have to be the funniest ones I can think of. Because what is a cake mix? The dry ingredients put together. . . literally flour, sugar, baking powder, and the flavoring. It takes only a few minutes more to measure these into a bowl. By the time you have read the box and opened the packaging you could have done this amount of measuring. You still have to add all the other stuff yourself anyway. What was the point?
And yet the idea of easy has made some companies very rich. When you stop and really think about it – there are a LOT of pre-made food items that are just as silly.
And frankly that is the point for the food industry. They work hard to convince you that convenience is more important to you than your health or your money.
They feed you the story line that quick is the same as nourishing.
So if you are truly serious about redefining your relationship with food, and improving your health and wellbeing, then adding up how you spend your food dollars is an enlightening exercise that can give you a lot of reasons to change.
When we start recognizing that food really is medicine and fuel for our bodies then it gets easier and easier to create better food habits. It all starts with awareness.
What are you eating today?
