Whole Foods, Whole Paycheck! That’s
how the saying goes, right? That phrase
always scared me away. I’ve always been
a Walmart kind of girl. The meat and
produce are always cheaper there. Why the need to go Wholefoods for my
groceries?
Then I started learning what was
actually in that chicken breast that I was buying from Walmart or what was used
to keep the pest away from those apples that my family had been consuming. Eeeeek!
So the adventure to learn how I could keep my family healthy on a
Walmart budget began.
First I will admit that eating
cleaner and healthier can be a bit more expensive. Eating fresh and not having packaged
processed foods can seem intimidating, especially for busy moms. But I am here to say that it can be done and
I will show you how.
I shop on Saturdays because the
hubby is home and that is the first available time I have without three kiddos
in tow. So on Saturday mornings I make
a meal plan. I try to keep meals as easy
as possible. The crock-pot can be a
mom’s best friend. I search Pinterest
for easy meals and make my grocery list according to what I need for the next
two weeks of meals. I don’t’ want to go
grocery shopping more than twice a month because each time that I go into a
store I end up impulse shopping for things that I don’t need. I only buy groceries at a grocery store. Everything else that we buy we get
online.
I don’t buy everything
organic. There are only certain fruits
and veggies that are highly contaminated with pesticides. There is dirty dozen list provided by EWG.org
of fruits and veggies that are the most contaminated so I buy those fruits and
veggies are only bought if I can get them organic. We eat lots of strawberries, apples, and
potatoes in our house. Those items are
bought as organic. We also eat lots of
bananas and raspberries, but they are not on the dirty dozen lists so to save
money we do not buy those items organic.
I love animals and hate animal
cruelty but I also love meat. So my
thought process is this….I want to eat the meat but I don’t want the animal
that I am eating to have lived a horrible life or encountered a horrible
death. Whole Foods has a rating system
for their meat and poultry. The rating
system is on their website, but basically WF rates all of their meat on a scale
of 1-5 with 1 being animals raised with no crates and no cages and 5 being
animals raised free roaming, outdoors on one farm their entire lives. I buy meats with a rating of 4 meaning that
the animal in which I have selected had been raised outdoors and was free to
roam. Oh, and the price of that meat is not that
much more than I would have paid at Walmart.
Now for those prepackaged food
families, you are in luck! Whole Foods
has a store brand called 365. So just
like Walmart has Great Value, Whole Foods has its own brand as well. I save tons of money by buying Whole Food’s
generic brand over the more expensive brand name labels. And with that I know that Whole Foods only
has non-gmo plant derived ingredients in its brand. So I do have breakfast bars in the pantry for
the kids to eat and I can throw some mac n cheese together for a side dish with
my organic meat. They also have milk,
butter, yogurt, etc. Great Money Saver!!
Whole Foods also has a sales ad at
their front entrances with coupons and specials for the week. Grab one on your way in and save even
more. And if you are like me and you
like to stock up on certain items, you can buy a case of your favorite product
and WF will give you a 10% discount to boot.
So with a family of 5, I can manage
to make my way through Whole Foods and buy what I need to feed my family on a
budget of about $200 every 2 weeks.
Sometimes a little more and sometimes a little less, but I am here to
say that it can be done. Happy, healthy
shopping!
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