One of my goals with my keto reset has been getting a handle on food costs. So often, I hear things like, “Keto is so expensive! I could never afford to do that.” In reality though, it doesn’t have to be expensive, and I hope to illustrate that over the coming weeks.
When I first designed this challenge for myself, I set a grocery budget of $150 per week. Since we get paid every two weeks, that means that to meet my goal, we need to have spent less than $300.
So how did we do? Well, we spent $317.96 last pay period, so we didn’t quite make the goal. That being said, I’m still ecstatic because I can’t remember the last time we spent that little money on groceries. What’s more, we only spent $13.90 eating out which is also an amazing improvement over the pattern we’d established for ourselves.
To give everyone some context, there are five of us in the household. My 11-year-old son and I are the only ones eating low-carb; my husband, my 14-year-old son, and my 17-year-old daughter are not.
As I look back at the grocery expenses, there are some places where we could do better. We spent $10 on ice cream (before I had started my challenge), we spent $10 on sushi, and we probably spent about $30 on diet soda. (It’s store brand soda, but that’s still a LOT of money to spend on zero-calorie beverages. That’s 10% of my budget.) Lastly, $17.49 funded my 14-year-old’s school meal plan for September.
You can see that there’s room for improvement, definitely, but overall, I’m pretty happy about the first pay period.i