How to eat healthier.

This post is going to be a step by step breakdown on how to adjust your diet to be both healthier and cheaper.

1) Start by prioritizing you food rules and goals. To clarify, make an ordered list of the rules you follow when choosing what you eat. This includes religious restrictions such as kosher or halal, ethical restrictions such as cruelty free or organic, and health and lifestyle restrictions such as the paleo or vegan diets. Yes, I know that veganism can be for ethical reasons, or for some, religious reasons, all I am saying is to make a list of what is important to you about food.

2) Now I want you to make a list of staples that can form the base of your diet. For the sake of this post I will be using an unrestricted diet as an example. I would recommend food items such as brown rice, beans, peas, pasta, potatoes, and such. As you can see these are all examples of tubers, grains, or legumes (sorry paleo, you are going to want to substitute this section, except for the tubers, with a whole lot of veggies). All of these are cheap and easy to make. They can all be healthy if you follow a few basic rules in addition. Number one, you are going to want to buy whole grains wherever possible. A special note on this, whole wheat is not whole grain, it is advertising jargon. Number two, stay low on the glycemic index. I am not going to go into details (it is really interesting if you want to research it separately), because all you need to know is that for every carb, you can look up its score on the glycemic index, and you want that score to be no more than white rice, which is 73, and ideally below 60. In reality, the lower the better. For those who have, or have a family history of, type two diabetes, I can not stress this point enough. Finally, you are going to want to buy the grains and legumes in their dried form, as this is both the most shelf stable and cost effective method, however if you know that the additional effort in preparing the dried ingredients will dissuade you from cooking them, then the legumes can be bought canned. Do not buy these ingredients precooked, though, because it raises the price astronomically.

3) I bet this next one is no surprise, but you are going to want to stock up on frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables are relatively cheap and keep for a while, allowing you to take advantage of sales. Everyone knows that they should be eating more vegetables, so I won't get nit picky. Just a quick reminder, though: corn, peas, and carrots do not count, they are each a grain, legume, or tuber respectively.

4) Say goodbye to meat. It is pricey and often times eaten to excess. Start following recipes that use stocks for meat flavor, or use cheap cuts as a flavoring agent. I am not saying that you have to be vegan, I am just saying that meat has only been consistently put on the table for every meal very recently, and that by cutting back, you will save money, and assuming that you do not replace it with junk food, will probably improve your health.

5) This one will probably be surprising, but start using more salt. Salt is cheap, and it makes everything taste better. This being said, do not just dump salt on your food at the table or buy salty food. What you should be doing is using more salt while you cook. Through the magic of food science, using salt while you cook make the food taste better and, here is the magic, takes less salt then adding it at the end.  (again, this is something that is very interesting if you want to research it on your own). The end result from this is that you will more likely want to eat the healthier foods, but you won't be making them unhealthy when you sit down to eat and douse them in salt because they are "bland."

6) Going hand and hand with the last one, use flavor. Spices are real, things like coriander or cumin, and they are what makes that fancy restaurant food so amazing. The bast part, is that they might seem expensive, but their potency actually makes them cheap.

7) Olive oil, enough said. It does everything, tastes good, and is healthy in moderation, plus it can be cheap if you aren't being picky.

Finally, to bring it all together, you are going to want to make the ingredients from step two in bulk and use portions of it throughout the week, or whatever time frame works for you. For each meal you are going to take that said portion and add the veggies from step three, and with a combination of steps four through seven turn it into food. Think of things like vegetable curry with rice, spaghetti with broccoli on the side, or roasted parsnips and herbed green beans. It isn't luxurious, but it is cheap, healthy, and most importantly, tastes good. If seems like too much, well, just pick one or two points and slowly start working toward incorporating more.