Help a broke girl out?

Food
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Alright, so I’ve been really scared to ask this because I know I’m going to be judged harshly. However, I’m a vegetarian, and a diabetic (obviously), and incredibly broke. I live paycheck to paycheck. Each month, I’ve got about $75 to spend on food.

Needless to say, I’ve had to stock up on junk food because it’s all I can afford. All of it is high carb. Ramen and poptarts are a good chunk of what I can afford to eat. I’ve applied for food stamps, but I doubt I’ll be approved (Louisiana is stingy, and BEFORE insurance and flexible spending payments, I do make ok money).

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to eat lower carb while on a serious budget?

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Leanne Brown’s Good and Cheap cookbook has several low-carb recipes. There was also a 20-recipe vegetarian “How to Cook Real Good Cheap Easy Food” poster on Lifehacker a while back that had several low-carb options.

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Hi NOLAbetic. I wonder if you might go to the local grocer and look for fresh veggies that are seasonal and on sale. Like right now, yams and all sorts of potato stuff are cheap. And watch the weekly ads for what is on sale and stock up. Cheaper than PopTarts, and way healthier than Ramen (I do like some Raman Noodles, though :wink: ). Lower carb is doable on a serious budget, just get with the seasonal produce.

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Oh, trust me, I worked in a produce dept for a few years. I know about seasonal produce. However, I get to shop once a month. Most produce (other than root veggies, squash, and potatoes) don’t last until the end of the month.

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Omg, at first I thought that was a link to buy the book. I’m so glad I clicked on it anyway! Thank you! There were definitely some winners that I saw as I scrolled through.

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frozen veggies are your best option then. and they are really cheap.

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Soup!! Make your own stock/broth… save any of the ends/peels/scraps of all your veggies in the freezer until you have a enough for a big stock pot full. Cover with water, any any seasonings you may have around being to a boil and let simmer as long as you want. Drain and Voila! The best stock you will ever have!! I portion mine into containers and freeze.

Good quality broth at the store can be 3-4 bucks for a little carton! This broth idea made me so happy when I read it somewhere. We eat a lot of soup!!

French onion soup, cauliflower soup, veggie soup, mushroom soup… all pretty low cost and low carb!

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Do you have a food cupboard in your area. This would help you to expand your budget. Have you thought about shopping 2 times a month? Saving out $15 to buy some vegetables? Good luck. Nancy

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It is very hard to eat a low carb vegan/vegetarian diet. You have to realize, making that choice (for whatever reason) means that your food will be more expensive, difficult and generally higher carb. You may want to consider whether there is any room for compromise (like pescatarian?).

Your budget of $75 is frankly too low. I would suggest that you see if there are any other household expenses you can get support for in order to free up more money for food. A good place to start is to simply go through your monthly income and expenditures so that you are very clear what money is coming in and where it is going.

Also shopping once a month is not the best way to reduce expenses. You should become an extremely aggressive opportunistic shopper. Buy marked down items which are often discounted 50% or more. Learn to use coupons and how to aggressively stack coupons. Using stacked coupons with sales I regularly get a number of free items every week. I also buy in bulk. Don’t buy a little bottle of olive oil, buy a gallon and use it over time. Buy a 5 lb bag of shredded cheese and put it in little zip lock bags in your freezer.

Also, I would recommend you target foods that are low carb, high fat/protein and high calorie like cheese. You can often find cheese for $2-3/lb. A pound of cheese is like 2,000 calories. Pop-tarts cost roughly the same for the same amount of calories. Consider foods like Channa Dal which you can buy very inexpensively in dry form and which has high protein and low glycemic index.

Finally, I would urge you to make a conscious decision to stop eating “convenience” foods. Cook your own food from whole ingredients. That will dramatically improve your choice and variety of foods and save you much money.

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Are you on insulin? I think if you are, there are ways to work with those kinds of foods, even if they aren’t ideal on a number of levels. YDMV, but I know for me, the prospect of eating the same, packaged high carb foods repeatedly would be a lot more workable than a more typical, variable, “I eat what I want to eat and cover it with insulin” approach. If you’re eating a lot of the same type of ramen, for instance, it will take some testing, but you may be able to find an insulin approach/dose that consistently works (for me it would probably be something like pre-bolus by 30 min, and round up in my calculation/somewhat more aggressive dosing). I would also tend to group my eating carbs into larger, fewer meals, so those post-prandial rises happen less frequently. Also, consider trying to pick as your go to foods the options with the most fat in them—high carb tends to be more manageable if also high fat.

If you’re not on insulin, it seems like it would be a lot harder…

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Actually, I would urge you not to go on a Ramen noodle diet. A package or Ramen has 55g of carbs, 14g of fat and 10g of protein. It also has almost 2000mg of Sodium. And worst of all, it is a highly refined food containing almost no vitamins or minerals. If you sustain yourself on this stuff it will likely cause you to become malnourished and sick. You deserve better.

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I can’t imagine anyone judging you harshly here! I can, however, imagine a number of people suggesting that eating low-carb vegetarian on a shoestring budget sounds… daunting at best, and impossible at worst.

So at best, I can give a few pointers I’ve come up with for my own family:

  1. Processed food is always more expensive than cooking from scratch. Not actually always true, but it’s a pretty good guideline. Find a bulk-food seller and use that.

  2. Nuts (from the bulk bins) are your friend as a vegetarian: they are high in fats, many are low in carbs, and high in fiber.

  3. Increasing your consumption of healthy fats can go a long way to feeling full and eating well: olive oil and coconut oil are two relatively affordable, healthy fats. If you eat butter, grass-fed butter is also a very healthy fat for most people.

  4. Learn to like meals and “flours:” chia seeds, flax seeds and meal, almond meal, coconut flour, and hazelnut flour are affordable (if bought in bulk) and can add a lot of good calories to your diet. They’re also low in carbs.

  5. Use an app like Myfitnesspal or calorieking to count the macros in everything you eat! It’s really important for dosing insulin, but even if you aren’t on insulin, it’s very important in tracking your overall calories and carb consumption so you know how your BG responds to different meals.

  6. Avoid root crops and grains. Even though we all love them and they store forever, starchy roots and grains are really difficult to consume in quantity and control BG if you’re on orals, diet, and exercise. If you’re on insulin, you may be able to get away with eating such staples. Personally, I couldn’t use those as staples and satisfactorily manage my BG, but you might be able to.

  7. Protein is going to be hard. If you aren’t against milk products, you can eat cheese, whey protein, and curd, which are all carb-free or very-low carb and have good fat and protein profiles. If you are a no animal product type, then you’re pretty much stuck with soy protein. You can get low/no carb tofu, and you better learn to enjoy it :slight_smile: Every other form of plant protein that isn’t horridly expensive and isolated (pea protein, for example) is chock full of carbs, which makes diabetic life difficult…

Let us know how it goes! I’m not a vegetarian now (I was many, many years ago), and I’m always curious how vegetarian and vegan diabetics manage. Seems like most of us live off of lean meats and nuts when it comes to low-carb eating.

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Hi @NOLAbetic,
EDITED TO ADD: So I actually opened the book and there seems to be a lot of stuff that I personally don’t believe in. (Stuff about leaky gut, detoxing ,etc.) But it might still have good recipes.
I just got a link to this free cookbook through our local diabetes support group:
https://www.amazon.com/Reset-Factor-Kitchen-Wellness-Maximize-ebook/dp/B01N63DQBJ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1479489458&sr=1-1&keywords=the+reset+factor+kitchen

Seems like it’s free, though FYI I haven’t read through it at all.

Also, I know when I was living in co-operative housing, we created a food pantry that purchased bulk goods wholesale directly from the manufacturer (as well as, back in our more anarchist days, supplementing the collective pantry supplies with dumpster diving). Anyways, that shaved about 10 to 15 percent off our total grocery bill, and collectively purchasing things also helped because, say, maybe you wouldn’t be able to afford a whole avocado for one meal, you could still afford one sliver of one avocado split 8 ways. Though with wholesale orders you had to have a minimum order. So if you have buddies, maybe pool your resources? I’d also say figure out if you can do some kind of collective food shopping so that, for instance, you shop for a friend once a month, they shop for you once a month, and so on. If you had 3 friends you could be getting your food once every week and a half, which would allow for more economizing and better food options. If you want to live a vegetarian, low-carb lifestyle on $75 a month shopping for food only once a month, your pickings are pretty slim.

But even with more frequent shopping your challenge is pretty daunting: The budget for our household was about $95 per person 10 years ago and that was not enough, even though all the communal food was vegetarian and we were big fans of cheap eats like beans, lentils and grains. Most people wound up eating out for at least two or three meals a week with that baseline budget.

Another thing you can look into, even though it takes a ton of time, is extreme couponing. http://www.livingwellspendingless.com/beginners-guide-to-coupons/thebeginners-guide-to-coupons-2/

Of course, all of these approaches to budgeting are essentially using your time to save money. It sounds like you’re on a hamster wheel with little of either, so I really do sympathize. Good luck and let us know how things work out.

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I’m not suggesting someone go on an all ramen diet—I never said eat only ramen/pop-tarts, but rather if someone is going to eat that kind of thing repeatedly anyway (and I think some of the suggestions here, while well intended, may not be realistic for someone who is strapped for both cash and time/energy), it’s not incompatible necessarily with decent glucose control, and that learning how to effectively manage insulin around a few regular options might actually be pretty doable. Certainly there’s no reason not to combine that advice with also trying to work in lower carb/less processed options where possible that are easier to manage diabetes-wise.

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I agree largely with what you are saying in the rest of your comments in this thread, but I think the constraints of the problem itself (“help me control my blood glucose as a vegetarian who spends less than $75.00 per month on food”) are what makes the other suggestions not realistic. I honestly can’t imagine how I would eat on $75.00 per month, in the US or Canada, unless I was relying on staple foods like rice, dried beans and lentils, corn meal, and flour. There just aren’t enough calories in anything else (that’s affordable) to live on $75.00 per month.

Pop-tarts and Ramen are expensive (in terms of calories and nutrients per dollar spent), and they’re also both full of carbs. If you have to spend your seriously limited dollars on carbs, it makes the most sense to spend them on cheaper, more nutrient-dense sources of carbs (like brown rice, beans, lentils, etc.). But I do understand the “sticking with a known quantity.” There is a reason I appreciate cooking/eating at home: I know what the macro and nutrient content of my foods are, whether they are prepared and packaged from the store (Pop tart equivalent) or from scratch (thanks to a food scale).

Just to illustrate the point, since I’m a math guy, more or less, let’s look at Pop-Tarts as staple food. The bonus is you know the nutritional value of each Pop-Tart very precisely. Here’s the nutritional and price Info:

  1. Cheapest I can find them (with shipping and tax) is $13.59 per 36 with free shipping if you purchase more than $49.00 at a time from Amazon.com.

  2. Once a month, our OP can buy 5 packs of 36 Pop-Tarts each, get free shipping, and spend only $67.95.

  3. Those 5 packs yield 180 Frosted Cinammon and Brown Sugar Pop-Tarts per month, and each pastry (a single serving) has: 210 calories; 7g of fat; of 35g of carbohydrates; and 2g of protein.

  4. For 28 day months, 180 Pop-Tarts yields approximately 1,350 kcal per day, which actually sounds livable (although I’d be losing about 5 lbs a week on that, OP is presumably smaller than I am)! That’s with 228g carbs per day, but only 13g of protein per day.

  5. During those 28 days, OP would have about $7.50 to spend in addition to the Pop-Tarts (for the entire month), but would likely have to spend that on protein for a simple reason. 13g of protein per day is totally unsustainable for a simple reason: assuming 1,350 is a caloric deficit, eating only 13g means the human body will automatically be in a catabolic state and burning protein for energy. This means that OP’s body on Pop-Tarts alone will very likely be burning her only muscle (and then bone mass) for energy.

  6. Being in a constant catabolic state is more or less what makes anorexic people so ill and eventually kills them, so it’s not exactly desirable. But beyond that, OP wouldn’t be getting many micronutrients. Since Pop-Tarts have 0% Vitamin C and 0% Vitamin D, unless she spent her remaining $7.50 on supplements, she’d likely develop Rickets and Scurvy before long.

  7. You can see where this is going…

tl;dr: The moral of this particular story is that OP can not live on Pop-Tarts alone, at least not for very long. And $75.00 worth of Pop-Tarts doesn’t go as far as you’d think. Splitting the cost between Ramen and Pop-Tarts isn’t likely to help with the catabolism or micronutrient deficits, so that isn’t going to work either.

I get what you’re saying. Yes, bolusing (or just accounting if you aren’t on insulin) for Pop-Tarts and Ramen is easier than making your own food because the convenient nutritional info makes it simple to calculate carbs, fats, proteins, and calories. Does that mean, however, that it will be easier to live well as a diabetic if you eat only cheap, pre-packaged foods? If you’re limited to $75.00 a month for cheap, pre-packaged food, I’m not sure that easy bolusing and good BG control is worth it if you die of starvation or scurvy.

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Again—wasn’t trying to suggest that a person just eat those things 100%. Only that having cheap higher carb stuff like ramen as part of a diet, even a regular component, may not necessarily have to kill one’s diabetes control (even if it makes it harder), and there are ways to try to mitigate the effects, in addition to the other suggestions made here.

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I only use half the flavor packet. So half the fat and sodium. To bulk it up, I add peanut butter, sriracha sauce, and some bean sprouts (cheap and easy to sprout myself).

I’d love to spend more on food. But where else should I cut from? My rent? The gas to get me back and forth to work? Or the credit card payments (I’m about $15k in debt d/t not having insurance for a year, and then a year of pre-existing condition)? Student loan? Those are where every penny of my money goes.

Thank god I have a flexible benefits account to pay for insulin and pump supplies, otherwise I’d be dead a long time ago.

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I agree (assuming OP is on insulin… becomes ever more difficult if one is only taking orals as carb intake goes higher) with what you’re saying. I just thought it was funny to realize that eating Pop-Tarts and Ramen noodles only would likely lead to death by Scurvy within a few months. I started doing the math (to see if it was possible to live on $75.00 of Pop-Tarts a month) and just continued because I was having fun :slight_smile:

If I had free insulin (so that my rising use didn’t offset the gains), and I had to live on less than $75.00 a month for food, I’d personally do it with rice, beans, and lentils. Complete proteins when two of the three are combined, high in fiber, and measurable at the counter. Predictable in terms of BG rise. And cheap as dirt to buy dry from bulk bins.

But I’m glad I don’t have to live that way. I happily eat LCHPMF which I couldn’t afford if I made less money, I suspect.

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Rice and beans are my basic dinner staples (along with poptarts for breakfast and ramen for lunch). However, I work twelve to fourteen hour days. I don’t have time to buy dry and cook forever. :frowning:

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Pretty sure you won’t find any prepared or fresh foods that you can afford that will make that easier. I eat low-carb, high protein myself, and I have the same complaint. All my foods are basically refrigerated or nuts. Nuts are about the only thing I can eat raw/unprepared that are low-carb, and I’m about sick of them at this point :slight_smile:

Dry lentils, beans, and rice are the only way to get enough calories and protein to live on $75.00 US. Sounds like you’re probably doing as well as you can. The only other thought I have on it is, and this is directly related to food prices, find a roommate. Probably not ideal, but…cutting back on rent sounds like the only reasonable way to free more money for your food. I had to do it in my twenties and thirties because I just couldn’t afford to pay for everything living on my own (even though I’d rather have done it).

If you find a roommate that you like, you might even find time to cook and eat together at some point. Only way I was able to afford food for decades (splitting rent and food costs with friends). I also had a big garden. Otherwise, it’s the bulk bins for you. And make sure you supplement. Rice, beans, Pop-Tarts, and Ramen doesn’t have enough vitamins to stave off serious, debilitating diseases like Scurvy and Rickets. I made a joke post about trying to live on Pop-Tarts alone above, but it’s a real problem: prepared foods are notoriously lacking in micronutrients, and they’re terribly important to being healthy.