Health Quest – Where Are The Veggie Coupons?

Today is officially day 12 of our Whole30 challenge.  I’m starting to get really used to all of this now.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still really exhausting to do all the food preparation.  I really miss the couple nights a week that we used to go out for dinner,  just for the break from cooking.  I enjoy cooking – but cooking everything from scratch with all new recipes that I’m not used to yet is starting to get really tiring.  It takes double the amount of time to make dinner than it used to, but I know that I’ll get better at it as I get more used to cooking the Whole30 way.  So far, there is only 1 recipe that I’ve made,  for this cold broccoli salad, that was actually awful.  It was so bad that I couldn’t even get it down my throat, and I love broccoli – in fact, all 5 of us love broccoli – but NONE of us liked this salad.

We have discovered smoothies for breakfast and they have changed EVERYTHING!  Last week, my kids woke up with a bad attitude knowing they had to eat some eggs and veggies for breakfast.  Now, after discovering smoothies, they run downstairs asking for their smoothie!  I fill them with spinach, avacados, seeds, nuts, fruit and coconut milk and they LOVE them! I honestly just love that there is no whining at breakfast anymore!  It starts the day out so much better!

I just went grocery shopping at 8pm on Friday.  Yes, clearly I have no life, but it’s the only time I could fit it in and we were totally out of fruit already.  Can you believe that last week the 5 of us went through 6lbs of bananas, 5lbs of Halos, 4 heads of lettuce, 6 dozen eggs, I don’t even know how many pounds of meat, and tons of other fruits and veggies?  It’s crazy!  It’s good, but I had no idea that my kids were bottomless pits – they never seem to stop eating.  They are always asking for a snack.  But, I truly love seeing how colorful our meals are and just how adventurous my kids are with the veggies I’m preparing.  When there are no other choices except some veggies, and when my kids are hungry, then they are willing to try just about anything.  It’s great!

BUT, I do have an issue I need to discuss – my grocery budget.  Ohmygosh, it’s killing me!  My budget has gone up so much this month.  The problem is that we do a zero based budget every month and we definitely didn’t budget enough for this  month.  I grossly underestimated how much all these fresh fruits and veggies were going to cost us, and on top of it, I don’t have any coupons for veggies!  Being a huge couponer, it’s very hard to go grocery shopping and not have a huge percentage of the bill paid for by my coupons.  Honestly it kills me!  I have to be really extra creative with any coupons that I can use on my groceries that I need to buy, especially Whole30 staple items.

Usually, when I’m pushing my budget I just work extra hard on using what I have in my stockpile to make due.  I would love to dip into my stockpile, but honestly, my stockpile is full of a lot of things that we really should just get rid of, and things that are not at all Whole30 compliant. I find that I’m buying a lot of new things, that in the future, I can slowly start stocking up on, but in the mean time, it’s expensive to completely change the products you used to buy and start over with new ones.  I don’t even want to think about how much money I have in my stockpile on items that I should really just toss out the door.  It’s hard for my money-saving, frugal-living brain to comprehend just how much money I’m losing and knowing I need to buy other stuff.

This is one time when I wish I wasn’t such a good couponer, and didn’t have such a decent stockpile of “normal” staple items.  I’m sure you are wondering what I’m talking about? Well, I mean stuff like peanut butter, ketchup, cereal, muffin mix, cake mix, popcorn, brownie mix, pasta sauce, pasta noodles, flour, chocolate chips, etc.  Those are the types of things I used to stockpile and that I have a big pile of right now.  We used them all the time, they were quick, easy, and made for a yummy dinner – but I know none of that is good for me or my family.  But, it’s still frustrating.  Old habits are hard to change! Wonder what next will teach me?!  How are you doing this week?