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September (Food & Money) Diet – UPDATE

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I wrote at the end of August about starting a MONEY and FOOD diet for the month of September. Has anyone been joining me? I wanted to check in with a progress update now that we’re nearing the end of the month!

Meal Planning & Eating At Home

I give us a solid A for eating at home. I’ve only relied on take out a couple of times and it’s been “healthier” fast food type foods so it’s been relatively inexpensive. For example, I’ve gotten a grilled chicken salad from Chick-Fil-A one week and from Salad-and-Go another week.

I’ve meal planned a variety of healthy foods to have at home. And I took a different approach than normal. Instead of meal planning for a single week at a time, I meal planned for the entire month of September. This allowed me to think strategically about foods I might have leftover one week, and how I could repurpose it later in the week or early the following week, etc.

To give an idea, I made 3 separate meals out of a large pork loin. The first meal was crockpot pork loin with mini potatoes and carrots. For the second meal, I took about half the leftover pork and pulled it, tossed with BBQ sauce, and served with baked beans and broccoli as sides. For the third meal, I took the other half of the pork, pulled it, and pan fried it up with some taco seasoning to make it like carnitas. I served it on flour tortillas for the family (and just on lettuce for me since I’m doing low carb), with a fresh pico-de-gallo chalked full of flavorful veggies.

I love how crockpot meals simplify things at dinner time, and I’m also a big fan of the “cook once, eat twice” motto of basically repurposing food after its been cooked to use in a second meal. It speeds along the prep part of dinner and saves time and money.

Money Diet

My goal was to have total food spending this month be $750 or below and, although we still have a week to go, I just placed my final grocery pick-up order and we’re barely going to squeak by at our goal!

I think having a grocery plan for the month helped dramatically, as well as doing online pickup orders so I wasn’t tempted with point-of-sale purchases. I will say that I did not do a Costco shopping trip this month and, if I had, I definitely would have gone over. Even though we use Costco mostly for paper products (e.g., paper towels, toilet paper, paper plates), I still put this in our “grocery” budget. I’m happy with the “win” of meeting our goal……but also fully acknowledge that I certainly would NOT have, had I done our typically monthly Costco trip. It’s progress, but still more room to improve, too.

Recipes

I want to share a couple of fun recipes I used this month, just in case anyone else is looking for new meal ideas.

  • Blueberry Sweet Potato Breakfast Meatballs

    These are a new favorite! I got the recipe from a friend and had initially given it major side-eye. It’s a lot of flavors together and sounds odd. But I’m here to tell you – it comes together beautifully and is delicious! I’ve already made the recipe twice! I make a big batch, then freeze so I can pull out just a couple balls at a time to re-heat for breakfast.

  • Hawaiian Shrimp Taco Bowls

    These are amazing! It’s nice to have something different (we otherwise eat a lot of chicken and pork), and the homemade cilantro lime crema is the star of the show! I eat mine with cauliflower rice, while the rest of the family eats jasmine rice. I won’t lie the cauliflower rice is not as good. But it’s a nice low-carb substitution.

  • Ginger Steak Salad

    This is technically not Whole 30 due to the sugar in the marinade and salad dressing. But this is where I say I’m doing Whole 30-ish because this is still much healthier than what I might otherwise eat (like fried chicken or pizza! Ha!), so I call it a win! In fact, we’ve had a LOT of salads this month. Feels good to get in the fresh veggies. And a homemade dressing is always better than store-bought, in my opinion.

Has anyone else followed along this month with a food and money diet? How did you do? Have any favorite Whole 30 (or Whole 30-ish) recipes you want to share? Drop them in the comments!





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