Buy this, not that .......

Sometimes, a simple substitution or a few minutes of doing something yourself can save a lot of money.

A do this, not that......you need to fuel your body during the day.   Its not good to eat a small breakfast, and then nothing until dinner and gorge yourself at dinner.    You are carb loading and don't have time to wear off the carbs before you go to bed.   I lost a ton of weight when I was in the rehab recovering  from a broken hip.  We are a hearty, protein filled breakfast at 8 am.  A ‘dinneer’ that was skimpy by all accounts at 12:00 and a snack sized dinner at 5 o’clock.  Nothing until 8 the next morning.   I survived.   But I lost 10 pounds that month and I exercised twice a day.   It was controlled.   I didn’t exercise for hours, but I also didn’t carb load to compensate for the added exercise.


Buy bread, not bread crumbs.   Bread crumbs are the easiest thing to make.   My 6yo granddaughter can make them—- all but setting up the food processor.  It can be make with the plastic blade.   Breadcrumbs cost 2.40 a lb.   I got hamburger for 2.44 a pound.   Personally, I’d rather eat the hamburger,it has more nutrition.

Buy real Parmesean cheese, not the take stuff in the green can.  It is full of wood pulp to keep it from caking.   If Parmesean is too expensive, buy any hard cheese.   Sometimes we grate our own with a micro plane, sometimes, I buy it shredded .   It’s a little luxury that makes a big difference.
Because of the way it is made, it has no lactose, so I read.

Buy butter, not fake butter.   The nutritionist told me that using a skim of butter was better than using fake butter.   Many fake butters have hydrogenated oil in them.  The scientist say that hydrogenated oil thickens the blood.   Read labels.   If palm oil is supposedly going to kill your children in Nutella, it can kill you in fake butter.  Just logic.  Ingredients have to be listed in order of volume.   There is more of the ingredient first listed, than there is of the things you cant pronounce at the end of the list.

Making your own pizza saves a ton of money .   You can make a pizza for less than a dollar using ingredients that are purchased at RBP’s.   Its not hard and a 1.50-2.00 pizza dough costs .19.  Save up bits of veggies and meat from meals made during the week and keep them in the freezer door.  I call it almost free pizza.   Its labor free because the veggies and meat are already processed and it takes less time than ordering a pizza and waiting for delivery or standing in line for take n bake.   Pizza sauce is a dollar for a name brand at the DT and you can freeze it in an ice cube tray (also at the DT) and pop it out into a quart bag. We use 2 cubes for a pizza.   This doesn’t waste sauce.   You get 5 pizzas out of a jar of sauce.   We started our granddaughter a couple of years ago.   She is to the P.O. t where she can take a pizza from the dough ball to the ready for the oven herself if the ingredients are
set out for her.   You may get a smiley face with the pepperoni , but what the heck.   Too many college graduates are unable to boil and egg.   They don't teach life skills in school anymore, I am told.   Children can learn little things from the time they are small.   We don't let her deal with raw meat, anything sharp, or hot.   But, there is a lot of things they can learn and you know what they are doing while you are making a meal.

Not boxed mac and cheese, but scratch Mack and cheese.   Boxed mac and cheese is full of preservatives and tsp.   Tsp is the detergent that we sold at the paint store so that painters could clean the grease etc off walls before they painted them.  You need to wear rubber gloves so that it doesn’t eat your hands. Annies is the same  as Kraft except Annie’s  has more fat.  

Basically, real is always better than fake.   If you are worried about fat, or salt, use less of it.   We
have processed meats, we just cut back to using them sparingly.   A piece of bacon on top of a casserole that feed 4-6 people, is not as bad as a pound of bacon.   1/ 2 of a five ounce package of pepperoni on a pizza give you the flavor, but you can supplement it with chopped peppers, mushrooms, and olives.