If you are on a strict grocery budget, I highly recommend paying close attention to step 5 and step 6. You wouldn’t think these steps could make that much difference, but I know for a fact they do.

Mindfulness

If your budget isn’t quite so tight,  I would practice being mindful at the grocery store.

I was talking to another person in town about our small mom/pop type grocery store called Lueders versus going to Wal-Mart. At Lueders, you go in and buy what you “need” without throwing other items into your cart. Junk food is priced extremely high there while meat and vegetables are reasonably priced (possibly a bit more than Wal-Mart, but not always.) The person I was talking to said they don’t like the lack of variety at Lueders. As a person following a primal “ish” diet, I find it refreshing (for the most part.)

Rush Hour

At 5:00PM if you want to buy a gallon of milk it takes just a few minutes to walk to the back of the store, grab your milk and check out. The customer service is quick! They always open extra lanes so you don’t have to wait. If you try to do the same thing at 5:00 at Wal-Mart, you park 5 miles away, fight the traffic and stand in line.

Being mindful of the items I buy with my grocery money as well as where I spend my grocery money is one of my goals (step 1.)

Another goal is to budget as much money as possible for food that makes us feel good. Therefore we’ve bumped up our grocery budget considerably. This is a 180 degree difference compared to how I previously felt about grocery money. My goal before I believed in “you are what you eat” was to spend as little as possible on food.

Unfortunately, I may be spending too much on “healthy” treats and snacks. I think that I’m trying to bribe my kids into the primal “ish” lifestyle. It doesn’t appear to be working. They are still buying (and eating) junk food all the time. I’m afraid if I say no all the time, they’ll end up being closet junk food eaters. They know what happens when they eat junk, but it doesn’t seem to affect their teen age minds.

I know that I need to break down our spending (step 7) so I can see where I’m spending most of my money. Good food = meat/protein, fats (butter, olive oil, coconut oil) and vegetables which should be where the bulk of my grocery money is spent. I shouldn’t be spending a lot in the following categories:

• Fruit
• Dairy
• Snacks/Treats
• Other

I get more grocery money tomorrow.  For the next two weeks I’m going to keep track of how much I spend on good food vs. the rest of the categories.

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This post has been linked to:  Food Renegade and WorksForMeWednesday.