Hello, we’re Anna and Tom. Let us tell you a bit more about ourselves.
Everything we are telling you, all the recipes and tips we share with you on this website are based on how we have been eating, cooking and budgeting for the last 10 years. We both work busy full-time jobs, and we had to save up for a deposit to buy our first home, but we didn’t want to compromise on a healthy diet.
After buying our first home, we continued with the Cheap Healthy lifestyle to save up for our wedding. Then we moved house for a second time, and now we have a small child. We’re sure there will always be new things that we’ll need to put some money aside for, and the Cheap Healthy way of doing things works for us. We hope that by sharing our experiences, it might work for you too.
It all started with a tin of tomatoes…
When we met, it quickly became apparent that we shared a passion for good food. On our 3rd date, Tom cooked a lovely lasagne, and Anna noticed that he was only using premium brand products. She pointed out the tin of tomatoes and asked what he thought was better about those tomatoes than a supermarket brand. All he could come up with was that this was the brand he was used to buying.
- Look at which products you could save money on by buying non-branded, or by switching from the supermarket range to the value range (honestly, the tinned tomatoes are ALL fine!)
- A great TV show that educates families on this has been ‘Eat well for less’ on the BBC with Greg Wallace — if you need some inspiration look out for the next series!
About a year after we moved in together, Anna decided to retrain to become a teacher – that meant going back to university for a year, and we had to watch the money. Because we both enjoyed cooking and eating nice food, we made an effort to find affordable recipes and save money on our food bill.
- We made a weekly meal plan and ensured we only bought what was on our list when we were in the supermarket.
- Whilst making the food plan, we made sure to check what we already had in the cupboards and fridge to use up food that may otherwise go off.
- We completely cut out takeaway breakfast, lunch, and coffee, and we made sure that we prepared our food ready to take with us to work the next day. A good system for this is one person preps breakfast and lunch for the next day, whilst the other person is making dinner (assuming there is two of you).
We did well at cutting down our food spend, but we both also gain a few pounds because a lot of our meals were very pasta, bread and generally carb-heavy.
It was about at this time that we came across a documentary called ‘food matters’. Through that documentary, along with ‘fat sick and nearly dead’ and ‘hungry for change’, it became clear that, in an attempt to save money, we had lost track of the health benefits our meals were giving us. So we had to rethink our approach:
- We bought a juicer.
- We became ‘weekday’ vegetarians.
- We found healthy recipes and adapted them to our budget by cutting out a couple of ingredients without compromising the taste of the dish.
- We started batch cooking to make the most of freshly bought ingredients, and also to have a stash of home-made ‘ready meals’ in the freezer for days when we didn’t have time to cook.
- We made a conscious effort to cut out processed food as much as possible – our rule is ‘if you don’t understand ALL the ingredients listed on the pack, don’t buy it!
- We became ‘discount supermarket’ shoppers, which allowed us to make significant savings on fresh fruit and veg.
What we didn’t do was fall for the ‘superfood trap’. Like so many diets out there, every now and then a particular food hits the press and is hailed as the new cure for…whatever. We are not saying that any of these foods are necessarily bad for you, but if you have a healthy, balanced diet that is full of fresh, non-processed produce, you don’t need them. Often, they are counterproductive because they make you feel better about the other little ‘sins’ that you include in your diet. And they are expensive!
That’s our story. Hopefully, our website will help you eat a healthy diet and save some money along the way – The Cheap Healthy approach has worked for us, and we’re sure it could help lots of other people too.