Episode 20
Hello and welcome to The Beyond Nourished Podcast. My name is Rachelle Girardin. I am a Certified Nutritional Practitioner and holistic private chat. I'm the owner of Beyond Nourished, and I have been in business for over 10 years.
If there is one thing I have done plenty of that is going to the grocery store and buying ingredients! I feel like this topic is on everybody's mind right now - it's on my staff's mind, it’s on my mind, it's on our client's minds and so what a great topic to talk about!
In this episode, I’m going to be talking about the rise of grocery store prices and what we can do about it. I'm not going to be talking about all of the reasons why they're going up, and I'm not going to go down the black hole of talking about inflation and how infuriating it is, but I just want to make mention that if you think that your grocery bill has gone up, it is in fact going up. Statistics are showing an increase in grocery costs anywhere between 5% to 11% in 2022.
Food is obviously a commodity. So that's not going to be a general statement for all products, but rather hitting certain sectors differently. We've also got supply chain issues going on at a national level here in Canada, as well as a global level due to the pandemic and covid. So there is a lot going on, but I want to turn the lens onto what we can do about it as people who are buying groceries, and more than that - people that are looking to continue to eat healthy because in addition to convenience items getting more expensive, so are vegetables, and these are things that are helping us be healthy and continuing to feel good.
Let's talk about this a little bit and come up with four really good ways that you can keep your grocery spending down.
The first thing is looking at your meat consumption. I feel in general, in the west, that we are over-eaters. We don't even really know how much we are in the privilege of eating. It doesn't matter if you're aware of your over-eating or not. As a culture, abundance and over-consumption are found in almost every meal, so not only just reducing the amount of meat because it is quite an expensive product but in general just looking at consumption as a whole. Do we need to be overeating at every single meal? Can we be making less? Some of you might be thinking, “Oh my gosh, I never want to consider making less, my husband would be so mad at me!”, but it's really just something to think about as you're having your lunch or your dinner today. What do you make for your family, what do you make for yourself? How are your hunger levels when you eat? How much do you eat? And past those hunger signals, eating too much is definitely causing you to have to buy too many groceries, so this is the first thing that I want you to look at in addition to the quality of ingredients that you're buying - which kind of segues into my second tip: how many convenience items are you buying? These products tend to have a higher price tag than other things, especially if you're buying the healthy items of these convenience items. What I mean by this are things that are pre-made or novelty items that you could perhaps make at home, but you don't have the time. Watch how many of those you have in your cart because typically you're paying not only the cost of the ingredients of those, you're also paying for the labour that was involved in making them!
The next tip is watching how much food you're throwing out. What is going to waste? The best way to mitigate this is to make sure that you have a plan. I suggest that you cook one or two times a week (yes, that's it!) by cooking three or four recipes all at once using our recipe stacking techniques and making sure that every ingredient that you buy is being used in those meal planning sessions. The final tip is to not over-complicate recipes and really watch that you’re not including too many ingredients in a single bowl or smoothie or recipe in general. You're going to continue to get a variety of ingredients in your diet on a weekly basis - even on a daily basis - but maybe try not to look at it on such a micro-level of every recipe or dish that you may need to have every colour of the rainbow. Simplify things a little bit!
I actually have a funny story about one of the first clients that I ever worked for. He was complaining to me about how expensive healthy eating was, and when I went to his house to go do an assessment, I couldn't believe that he was making a smoothie every morning that had over 26 ingredients in it! And they were expensive ingredients that he was using! He had severe gut issues going on with the inability to digest all of these ingredients, and it was costing him so much money to make that smoothie. I bet, if I had to guess, he was using over $35 of ingredients in those smoothies - they were super expensive superfoods. This is just one of those ways where you can perhaps look at your day-to-day eating and really look at simplifying things so that you're not using as many ingredients all of the time while maintaining your health.