Tell your low-cost keto success story!

(traci simpson) #21

I spend $150 every 8 weeks for my meats (Butcher Box)
two dozen eggs from the local farmer-$10
veggies from farmers market - roughly $10
cheese from the farmers market - $9 (smoked jalapeno cheddar) 1x a month
heavy cream (land o lakes ) $4 the expensive kind has less crap then the Walmart $2 brand
parmesan cheese (aldi) roughly $6 a month
butter a lot because I never want to run out
SO about $60 a month! much cheaper!!!

(hottie turned hag) #22

Girl you must be rich :rofl:
I paid .62 yes cents for 18 eggs at WM this week. Are those golden eggs or what?

(traci simpson) #23

Lol. No I just like to support the local farms

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #24

I canā€™t say I save much money because of keto directlyā€¦ But I did learn about Sous Vide here, and now Iā€™m buying lots of cheap beef, knowing that I can now make it tender and juicy every time :wink:

(traci simpson) #25

Is a Sous Vide the same as a crockpot?

(Lazy, Dirty Keto šŸ˜) #26

No they are different

(Jack Bennett) #27

Some stuff I habitually get is cheaper and some is more expensive:

Cheap
Ground beef
Eggs
Olive oil (bulk from Costco)
Coconut oil (bulk from Costco)
Heavy whipping cream
Butter
Chicken thighs
Canned salmon
Basic cheese

Expensive
Macadamia nuts
MCT oil
Protein powder

Typically the expensive items are more like ā€œsupplementsā€ than regular food items. Just an ounce here, an ounce there. Except for macadamia nuts. I could eat a pound of them a day Iā€™m sureā€¦

#28

Oh a nice topic I didnā€™t know about (I usually wait for others to resurrect topics, I am here way too much anyway).

Keto is my cheapest diet ever and I ate on a budget before, on low-carb, eating homemade food all the time (using way more expensive ingredients instead of cheap plant oil, sugar and flour but my costs still dropped when I went low-carb and started to eat way less). Of course, I could spend way more money on my food but no need (and I am poor anyway). Okay, sometimes itā€™s nice to eat something more luxurious or visit a nice restaurant but I never liked to do it often, it was and will never be significant. I buy most of my animal products from farmers or nice ladies who raises hens and rabbits on the side though and it makes it more expensive but tastier, better, I have my standards and principles (but not much money, thatā€™s why it is most, not all).
I eat the same on and off keto, I just have extra carbs (extra cost and often extra work) when I am not on keto. Now that I am on my way to ignore plants, my diet probably gets even cheaper, even with some good meat from farms. Itā€™s so nice fatty meat is the cheapest, I always preferred those parts.
So I donā€™t spend a lot of money on carbs, fat for my carbs (I usually eat more fat if I eat more carbs), I donā€™t need expensive sweeteners if I donā€™t really eat plantsā€¦ I consume less calories this way but thatā€™s the plan.
I will need more calories later but some more calories from animal fat isnā€™t expensive.

We donā€™t need much fancy, overpriced stuff on a normal day. We can eat eggs and meat and vegeables and other perfectly normal food. Iā€™ve read so many times that paleo, keto and every other popular diet is oh so expensive. Hell no. Buy normal food and not even the most expensive meat if you canā€™t afford that. There are so many not expensive options.

Of course, not every countries are the same. I canā€™t buy so insanely cheap eggs people often write about. Butter is quite expensive to me (but I still use some). Whipping cream is okay as itā€™s nice and a tiny bit is enough but it has lactose and I could buy some proper food with that moneyā€¦ So I use it sparingly and rarely.
I can afford so many things if the amount is tiny and they barely change my costsā€¦ I do have some fancy, expensive stuff - not almond flour or avocado or pecan, thatā€™s impossible for me, I mean coconut flour and the like. Itā€™s funny to hear people complaining that gluten free diet is expensive as they need to use rice flour :smiley: Rice flour is so ridiculously cheap, more expensive than the cheapest wheat flour, indeed but I am very sure the cost of our eating has almost nothing to do with the price of the flour of our bread. Unless they live on mostly bread or something. Buying a coffee every day, eating out now and then, these are way more expensive. But many people just look at the price of the ingredients. I think the same people go and easily make a cake using 500g butter and if something costs a lot, well that does. They could eat their gluten free bread for months with that money (minus the price of original bread. buy the way, if they bought normal, really cheap bread and now they make that themselves, itā€™s probably not even more expensive. not like there is such thing as gluten-free bread in my world but itā€™s their world) and itā€™s only a single ingredient though probably the most expensive.

Whatever. We can make it cheap enough. We can buy things cheaper, I use webshops, sales, I know where to find good stuff for a good price and think what I need and what is worth it to buy. We can just ignore everything really expensive and not needed at all.
People buy so many unnecessary, unhealthy, overpriced stuff even if they think they are too poor to afford decent things, I see that a lot. They donā€™t think enough.

#29

Today Iā€™ve made a batch of egg muffins (with cheese, mushrooms, olives, a bit of onion, bell pepper and tomatoes) that will be enough for a few days (around 25 muffins for 2 people). For lunch we had caesar salad (homemade dressing) and steaks (itā€™s Sunday, letā€™s enjoy it with good meat!).

Other than the muffins I already cooked and shredded chicken breasts (I mix them with mayo, celery, olives, bell pepper and make a salad) and got some cherry tomatoes and mozzarela to treat myself with a caprese salad during the week. Only bought seasonal (Southern hemisphere) or on sale ingredients. Milk cream was on sale so I got 10 small boxes.

Cashews and almonds are kind of expensive here and I only buy some occasionally. I love cashews but they have too much carbs, one more reason to avoidā€¦

Keto is by far the cheapest I ever ate so far. No more snacks, drive-thrus, delivered food at home, restaurants often, etc.

(Mother of Puppies ) #30

I usually pre-make one dish per week to have for lunch every day, and omelets when I have breakfast.
I repeat the prepped meal for two weeks and then canā€™t take it any more. :joy:

(Windmill Tilter) #31

Love it! I call this sort of eating ā€œboring ketoā€. Nothing drops pounds faster. When food ceases to be entertaining and ceases to give a dopamine hits, you just eat when youā€™re actually hungry. Eating like this was a real game changer for me!

(Laura Victor) #32
  1. Iā€™m brown-bagging 4-5 lunches a week now, usually leftovers or Keto Chow.
  2. Lot less snacking and treats ā€“ saving a bundle on protein bars.
  3. Less takeout dinners.
  4. no longer throwing out stale bread.
(Scott) #33

I used to struggle to find lower carb wraps for lunch and then it hit me. I just get some meat and roll up some cheese, add mayo or mustard in it and eat it with a hardboiled egg. A bag of pork rinds cost a lot less than chips too. My employees eat at fast food places (you should see their bellies expand) and probably spend at least $7 a meal.

#34

I have saved money on Keto. I have totally cut out snacks. Donā€™t want them and donā€™t need them for satiety. Did anyone else just feel like the were eating just for the sake of eating on a high carb diet? I try to do a couple of 36 hour fasts during the week, no food costs for two days only faucet water and salt. The other three work days I eat TMAD, all home cooked meals with usually clearance beef. I would OMAD but I try to up calories to keep metabolism elevated. On weekends I eat three meals with two of those usually at home and maybe one or two meals out on a Friday or Saturday evening. There is no way that I spend as much as I did on constant all day feeding.

#36

I have to eat a lot of fat to maintain my weight and stay keto without too much protein, so I save money by supplementing butter and olive oil with tallow and lard. I buy beef suet and pork fat from my local farm at $2.00/lb, render it to the fat, and save the meaty bits for high-glycine protein. I make the tallow and lard into whipped savory or sweet treats and eat them whenever I feel hungry between meals.

(Bob M) #37

How do you whip tallow or lard?

#38

I put about 36 oz of room-temperature lard and/or tallow into my Kitchenaid mixer, use the beater to smooth it out, add whatever flavoring I want, then use the whip until it gets fluffy and firm, and finally put spoonsful onto a cookie sheet and pop them into the freezer. After frozen, scrape them off the sheet and put into a storage container in the fridge or freezerā€“they last many weeks in the fridge. Here is a youtube short about it:

https://youtube.com/shorts/UEIlNwBa_JQ

#39

I make my lard using fatty pork, perfect for me. I donā€™t need much lard but I do need high protein, as lean as possible for me to enjoy. Pork shoulder is among the cheapest cuts (pure fat is somewhat cheaper but I donā€™t like that and protein is more precious) but pork belly is tastier so I am glad the local supermarket has it now, it even has bones for my soups and itā€™s as cheap as green ham! Yay! Only fowl is cheaper than that but I prefer pork (sometimes eat fowl but not much). Or ā€œscrap meatā€, itā€™s mixed (green ham, shoulders and chuck, my favorite) and VERY fatty so I get plenty of lard, a bunch of lovely scratchings and a nice pile of leaner meat to cook.

If I ever will need much more fat, I just eat fattier cuts all the time and I will have scratchings more often :wink: Yum! (I have my very fatty processed items too. Even in small amounts, itā€™s a lot of fat.)

My SOā€™s Mom buys raw duck fat (I never saw it anywhere but she finds all kinds of things for surprisingly cheap in the market) and renders it, nice stuff.

Nothing can replace butter but if I just want to fry something, lard is great. (Good spread on whatever one uses instead of bread too but I still slightly prefer butter.) As it is created by frying pork (thoroughlyā€¦ sometimes itā€™s halfway to scratchings with much meat, sometimes itā€™s mostly fat and I get proper, fatty, crunchy but a wee bit meaty scratchings, just the type I love), its color is darker and its taste is pretty goodā€¦

(Bob M) #40

@MikeMmm Thanks, I did not know you could do that.

I usually use lard for pork and tallow for beef. Unfortunately, I have multiple glass containers in the fridge and I donā€™t know whatā€™s in them. Just white stuff. So, Iā€™m not as good as I used to be and probably am mixing them.

#41

I only had pure tallow once but tallow and lard are quite differentā€¦ The lard can be less tasty but tallow has a pretty strong and unique flavor or is it just me with my very rare ruminant meat comsumption?
But if they are too similar, itā€™s not a big deal to mix them :wink:

We like to use the right fat for our dishes too, if that is possible. Sometimes I have a little bit of chicken fat too but normally just lard. Lard goes with everything (non-sweet) if you ask me but if you ask my SO, it only suits pork. (He doesnā€™t like eggy breads too, odd guyā€¦ :upside_down_face: )