Eating Healthy on a Budget?

Is it possible to eat organic on a tight budget? I don't know, but I'd like to try.

My goals with this blog are to track my food budget, eat healthier, save money and lose weight. I'm inspired by these folks:
1. Salon Article
2. Dear friend - Debt Hater
3. The Green Conscious and dear friend Vienna Teng
4. Food, Inc.
5. My girlfriend, a marathon runner, would like to lose weight.

I'm trying to get out of debt this year, luckily I don't have a lot of debt. Just a few thousand in credit card debt. And I'll pay my car off by the end of the year, which will save me a ton of money and make getting out of the rest of my debt easy, as I plan to apply what my monthly car payment was towards my other debt.

For the past year and a half getting out of debt has been a major life goal. I've taken several steps to try to facilitate this process.

1. I moved into a cheaper studio apt for 10 months, paying only $725 a month in rent. I have subsequently moved in with my girlfriend. We split the rent and I basically pay the same. My share of the rent is $787, but we have a washer/dryer in our unit. Which saves me $40 a month in laundry quarters. Also, my car insurance went down $15 per month starting this month. I also split the utilities, whereas before I paid them myself.
2. I got rid of cable, but brought it back when my girlfriend and I moved in together. But she pays for it, so...
3. When I need new clothes I try to shop at thrift stores. It's cheaper and it reuses. Two focuses of my life, as I'm a dedicated environmentalist.
4. I stopped drinking over two years ago. I didn't really care for it in the first place, so this has been a great money saver.
5. Eat out less, eat in more. I do admit that when my girlfriend and I started dating we ate out a lot, taking turns paying for the bill. We did this because she didn't really have a kitchen in her teeny tiny apartment in West Hollywood. But now we have a full kitchen again and I've been trying to make as many of our meals at home as possible.

Making meals at home brings us to the present. I've given us a $200 per month budget for food. This includes breakfast, lunch and dinner for the two of us. I plan on spending $30 a week at a local farmer's market. The remaining $20 will be used for Lactaid (girlfriend is lactose intolerant), proteins not found at the farmer's market and any other incidentals I can't get at the farmer's market.

Luckily, in Los Angeles the farmer's markets tend to be cheaper for vegetables than the grocery stores, but more expensive for fruit. Except when the fruit may be in season. Then on occasion I've noticed the fruit slightly cheaper, but not really.

I'm a environmental conscious vegetarian, so being able to buy organic vegetables from the local farmer's market is convenient.

Week One:
Farmer's Market
I only spent $20 a the Santa Monica farmer's market on Wednesday, because I didn't buy any fruit. I bought $24 of food at the grocery store earlier in the week, which included 4 boxes of strawberries for $.88 a piece.

Farmer's Market buys: $20
2 brocoli stalks
Alfafa sprouts
bean sprouts
bundle of carrots
1lb of baby potatoes
6 Vine ripe tomotoes
1 cucumber
Bag of lettuce
bundle of spinach
4 zucchinis

Technically, we have gone over our weekly budget because my girlfriend bought some baking mixes. She's helping a teammate with a bake sale to raise money for the Nike Women's Marathon she's planning on running in the fall. If you would like to make a donation to my girlfriend's fundraising efforts, please email me and I'll send you a link to her fundraising page.

One of the largest reasons I'm doing this experiment is because my girlfriend has requested that I help her lose weight as she continues her marathon training. She plans on running the San Diego Half Marathon in June, the Los Angeles Half Marathon in September and then the Nike Women's Marathon in the fall. If she loses 10lbs and runs 100 steps, that's 10,000lbs less that she's carrying. Which means less chance for injury and more endurance. Certainly, eating healthy meals at home is one of the fastest ways to lose weight.

In order to stay on budget I plan to plan as many meals out as possible. This ensures that I only buy what I need and stay within my budget. However, I also plan to buy a few new things each week from the Farmer's Market to force myself to learn how to make more items, so we don't get bored. And boredom is a recipe for straying from our healthy eating and spending money on crap; i.e. my much beloved Bagel Bites. Obviously, not a healthy food choice, let alone organic. Additionally, it's my goal to use everything I buy. Wasting food is wasting money and it's not an environmentally sound policy for someone who's dedicated to doing everything in my power to be an environmentalist.

So please join me as I try to get us eating smarter, healthier and cheaper.