Whole 30: The Cost of Healthy Eating

One of my biggest hang-ups about starting the Whole 30 challenge, and eating a Paleo diet in general, was how much this "real" food costs. Have you all been in a Whole Foods lately? Just count on everything being at least 50% more expensive than what you're used to paying.

Since I've been tracking what we've been spending the last three years, both in grocery stores and restaurants, I have a good grasp on our historical spending habits. I'll show you what we've been spending,  but before you condemn us for how much we spend on food, the cost of living in northern Virginia (less than 10 miles out of Washington DC) is ridiculous. Prices on average are about 20% higher than Richmond (a nearby city about two hours south), and maybe 30-40% higher than non-metropolitan areas. Bottom Line: GET US OUT OF HERE.

Anyway, I created the following tables from my old Excel spreadsheets, they show the monthly cost of food for my wife and I:

WE'RE TERRIBLE. WHAT THE #&@$ HAPPENED!?

Well, I have a variety of excuses lined up for you:

1. We got a little lazy, there's no denying that. We clearly went out to eat more.
2. We both started grad school which meant our free nights to make dinner dwindled away.
3. We started buying healthier food at the grocery store, ditching places like Giant or Harris Teeter in favor of Whole Foods and Mom's. We also went to restaurants that served healthier food. 
4. Lifestyle Inflation. We made more money so we thought we'd spend more money. Makes sense right?

So the burning question: how much did Whole 30 cost us for the month?

$1,027.30 or approx $500/person.

$69.09 at a restaurant (which I got food poisoning from) and $958.19 at the store. It ended up being about $500/person which, admittedly, is pretty terrible considering we cooked all but one of our meals. However, there's a lot we could do to bring that cost down.

1. For starters, before we even went to the store once, we said that money wasn't going to be the reason we failed Whole 30. We wanted to make it as easy as we could to get through the challenge so we didn't really meal plan for then one or two meals in advance. This means we weren't really shopping for deals.
2. We also never cooked in bulk. We usually made just enough for dinner that night and lunch the next day. This sort of ties back in to shopping for deals.
3. We shopped Whole Foods versus Trader Joes which was our biggest mistake. Whole Foods prices are so much higher based on their ridiculous overhead. I'm tired of paying their prices just so they can make everything look pretty on the inside of their store. 
4. We didn't participate in a crop share. There are many services in our area where local farmers will directly ship produce to your front door. You end up getting great deals. We'd actually done this in the past, and loved it, but at the time we were throwing a lot of produce away. We wouldn't be doing that on this diet.

Of course, there are more ways to save money then those four things I listed. In fact, I read one article where a guy was recommending to a) eat less and b) do your own hunting. (UGH. Really?) All in all, I think we could bring the cost down significantly, and we plan on doing Whole 30 again this year. My goal for when we do it again, $400/person. I think this is very achievable.

If you haven't yet done Whole 30, I hope you can use this information to your advantage. Just make sure you adjust my cost of Whole 30 based on your Cost of Living to get a better ballpark figure.