April 20th, 2011 - Diet costs

Some people have asked me how much I'm spending on this diet. Well, for the first time, I have some answers.

This time around, instead of buying my produce at Winco or Fred Meyer, I went to Gateway Produce (25th St and Andresen Rd in Vancouver). I have been pleasantly surprised! For the green beans and diced tomatoes I purchased those at Winco, however. Everything else listed for this came from Gateway.

For soup fixin's, I was able to purchase one bunch of celery, a bunch of green onions, 2 1-lb bags of baby carrots (cheaper than the whole carrots!), 2 green bell peppers, 2 cans of diced tomatoes and 2 cans of "fancy cut" green beans for a total of $7.19. This is, of course, not counting the cost of the water used to make the soup or the previously purchased beef bouillon and vegetable soup paste.

For days 1 (fruit), 2 (veggies + baked potato), and 3 (fruit and veggies), for two 1lb containers of FRESH strawberries, two big veggie platters (with ranch dip that I can't have), two big pears, and one large potato for Day 2's dinner, the total came to $9.16.

So, for the sake of breaking it down meal by meal, that's a total of $16.35 spent total. For the soup, I eat roughly 2 bowls a day, making it 51.3 cents a bowl (rounded up to $0.52). The other stuff comes out to $3.05 a day, rounding down from $3.0533. This means that my daily meal cost for the first three days (barring the purchase of more fruits and veggies as needed, which will most likely happen) is $4.09.

Better health and better diet for less than $5 a day. Not too shabby.

Obviously, once you tack on meat and some of the other ingredients for days 4-7, that might jump higher. But I'm going to keep track of it, and I'll post daily cost summaries as well in my daily wrap up.