Eating healthy while spending less
By Aaron Broverman • Bankrate.com

Rebecca Currie's quest to see if she could survive on a dollar's worth of food a day began with an article she read in the New York Times.

The story reported The World Bank statistic that nearly 1 billion people across the globe live on a food budget of a dollar a day and profiled a vegan couple who decided to find out what it was like to live that way for 30 days. The couple's daily rations typically consisted of pancakes and oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and beans, rice and homemade tortillas for dinner. Because produce was too expensive, they resorted to drinking Tang to avoid scurvy.

"I really didn't think they made the best choices with their food," says Currie, who lives in Durham, NC. "I've been spending $90 a month on groceries and shopping almost exclusively at Whole Foods for 15 years, so I know that you can eat healthy for not that much money."

Determined to show it was still possible to eat healthy for less, she began her own experiment using the same dollar-a-day-for-30-days premise, chronicling her progress in her blog, Less is Enough. Thanks to a growing interest in saving money because of the recession, Currie's quest gained widespread television attention from the likes of "Good Morning America," "Inside Edition" and CNN.

Of course, restricting your diet to a dollar a day is hardly recommended over the long term. "Spending $30 per month on food is not enough.  Food is your body's fuel, and it deserves to be valued more," says Aviva Allen, a Toronto-based nutritional consultant. However, Currie's experiment teaches us many things about how to eat healthy for less without going to such extremes.  

Shop a little bit at a time
"Plan out your meals in advance each week and from there, you can make a grocery list and buy exactly what, and how much, you need," says Allen. But making a shopping list doesn't work for everyone, including Currie, because it's difficult to know what you want to eat from one meal to the next.

"Things like that tend to work better for a larger household. If I don't like what I'm eating, even if it's the only thing I have, I'm either not going to eat it or eat it with some disappointment," says Currie.

Instead, she picked up staples like pasta, beans, rice, chicken stock, eggs and tomato paste but shopped for everything else she wanted daily. That way, she could be flexible and adjust what, and how much, she bought according to how she felt and her activity level that day.

"It doesn't tie up lots of money in stocking up on things. The more food people buy, the more they tend to consume," she says.

Buy smart
Although Currie's meal plans constantly changed, where she spent her money was not. To make her limited budget work, she knew she had to escape the first week with a little bit of food and a little bit of money left over.