Top 10 Tips for Living a Healthy Lifestyle on a Budget

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

{This is a collaborative post}

Living a healthy lifestyle can seem like an impossible task when you're on a tight budget. But with a little bit of creativity and planning, it's totally possible to stick to your health goals while keeping your finances in check.

In this post, Your Debt Expert shares top tips for living a healthy lifestyle on a budget. Through helping struggling individuals beat debt, Your Debt Expert provides everything from the latest solutions to everyday budgeting tips. If you or someone you know is struggling, make sure to visit HERE.

Check out their top tips below:

1. Eat healthy on a budget by Meal Planning

One of the best ways to save money and eat healthily is by meal planning. By taking the time to plan out your meals for the week, you can save money on groceries and eating out. Additionally, meal planning can help you make healthier choices as you will be less likely to make impulsive decisions when you are hungry.

2. Cut down on eating out

Eating out can be expensive and unhealthy. To save money, cook at home more often and only eat out on special occasions. When you do eat out, choose healthy options such as salads, soups, and wraps instead of high-calorie meals.

3. Buy in bulk

Buying in bulk can be a great way to save money on healthy food options. Purchase items such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains from the bulk section of your grocery store and cook in large batches so that you have leftovers for the week.

4. Invest in a slow cooker

A slow cooker can be a healthy and budget-friendly way to cook meals. Simply add in your ingredients, set the timer, and let the cooker do its job. Slow cooker meals are typically healthy as they are cooked with little to no oil.

#R2BC - Crazy Golf, Desserts and an Injection!

From our fab day Saturday, you only get to see my girls though as I can't show the little boy I coach

Happy Thursday friends! I'm feeling sure today will be a good day for us all so join me with that wishful thinking!

I'm using the same formula as last week and looking for one reason from each day of the last week highlight why I am feeling grateful. Here goes -

Thursday - Quite a child day, I coached my little boy, like I do each Thursday (we're making an Angry Birds pinata at the moment) and headed to the gym, so the day felt productive

Friday - I had my first injections as part of the preparation for my operation in January. I doubt many people would have an injection as a #R2BC but it cheered me as the end of in sight!

Saturday - I took my girls and the boy I coach out to celebrate this birthday. We played Crazy golf and had some yummy desserts at Kaspas and they were so good!

The Source of my Satisfaction

All my life I’ve been looking to the wrong place, the wrong source to fill the holes and to help in all situations. When times are tough and I feel down I turn to it, or equally when times are great and I feel elated and high, what do I do to celebrate? I eat; I appear to stuff my face in all situations and it is not at all healthy.

I could tell you I am a real foodie and I just love food but when I really think about it, that is not true. I’m not interested to try all the new tastes and to seek out the very best foods to satisfy my curiosity. In honesty I’m more interested to just eat those things I enjoy and to overdose on them. Food has become my drug of choice.

This needs to change, I’ve known this for many years but what has eluded me is how to change it. Willpower alone is certainly not working, I hate just sitting with that empty feeling when I want to eat. What I need is a different focus and the clues have been there for years but praying instead of eating has never really held a strong enough appeal for me. Luckily last weekend the penny dropped when I heard the same message from two different speakers at our Sunday Celebration.

I need to move my focus from myself to the Father and I have to do this through continued worship. It is my job as a child of God to be continually worshipping and praising Him, this focus on Him will ensure that I do not have time to just wallow in my small issues, I have to focus on the bigger picture. I’ve already being practising the principle of gratitude for many years now and I know the power of praise, I just need to up my game and when I feel that pull to eat, it must act as the trigger to sing and to lose myself in worship for a bit, because when I focus on God rather than myself, I have the natural order right and I feel certain the urge to eat needlessly will go away.

Of course, alongside this I need a god eating plan (I intended that to say good eating plan but actually decided that maybe the typo was God-inspired and I should leave it, as indeed I do need God to be in the plan!) to ensure that I’m getting all the nutrition I need and eating the right things to be able to keep my yearnings under control.

As someone who has had food issues all their life, the changes I need to make will not be easy. Many of the best things in life are not easy but they are necessary, so however hard it feels to change, I have to do it. At the moment I’m on a one way ticket to hell, a living hell on earth where I am trapped in activities that are not glorifying To God. To keep eating and stuffing my face with food to block my emotions and to feed my habit is disrespectful and neglectful but I have to get past chastising myself and I need to focus on the good. He loves me as I am and by making some simple changes, with my focus moving from self to Him, I can love me too and only then will many other elements fall into place and I can find the peace that I so dearly covet.

My dear friend Gordon who has gone through so much just recently encouraged me to grab Gods hand and walk with Him in 2016 and Nicole reminded me that we must give thanks first and then the miracles happen. I’m really looking forward to the miracle this year and seeing how the changes in me impact many other people.

Thanks for reading, Mich x

Released #Prose4T

Hello, if you have stopped by to find Reasons to be Cheerful then you need to head over to Lakes Single Mum as Becky is hosting for the rest of November and then in December it will be over with Jo at Ojo's World.

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I'm finding part of life quite hard,
it comes and attacks me, for I have no guard.

But unhappy is not the right word you see,
as in general life is as blessed as can be.

Good husband, great kids, nice home.
So many gifts, little cause to moan.

There is just this one area of my life,
it gives me so much pain and strife.

It should be easy, 'get a grip' you say,
but for some of us it just isn't that way.

I want to sort it out, I want to get better,
I know there's a need, that's why I'm writing this letter.

But there is no easy path,
it will be lots of hard work and graft.

Am I ready for that I wonder, can I take off this mask?
For unveiling makes me vulnerable and reminds me of the past.

But change has to happen, I can not go on this way,
I need to be strong each and every way.

Now is the time to stop being scared, a good example I must set,
and that means walking every day step by step.

No need to take great leaps Michelle,
every inch forward is a step out of this living hell.

Trust in the Lord and let Him be king,
then finally you will be released from this awful thing.

Thank you Jesus.

Plaque at Beachy Head, East Sussex

Michelle Pannell, 22 November 2013


Hop over and see Vic and the others who are joining in with Prose for Thought this week.

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Hello Fresh Meal Boxes (Review)

I’d not heard of HelloFresh before when they contacted me but when I mentioned their meal delivery service to a few friends I was told to bite their hand off for a complimentary hamper to review, as apparently they provide fabulous restaurant quality meals without the effort. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

I took a look on their website and it was all well laid out and easy to understand. There are three types of box of choose from – classic, vegetarian and family. Immediately my eye was drawn to the family box as that is what I have to cater for, a family of 5. Whilst the meals look very nice, I found them to be far fancier than my children would normally eat.  I would not say my kids are fussy but we have average home cooked family meals – things like shepherd’s pie, spaghetti bolognese, chicken stir fry or chilli. In the main these were not the type of meals provided by Hello Fresh. Some of the ones I saw reminded me of the meals I enjoyed when I used to frequent nice restaurants in London.

I then took a look at the classic box and found this to be better as you could do meal swaps, I’m not sure why you can’t do swaps with the family box. The swaps meant I found three meals that I thought all my family would eat and I went ahead and placed my order for Tuscan meatballs, Doona chicken and Orecchiette with herbed pork. The classic box is packed for either 2 or 4 diners and I choose the box for 4 as I felt this would be enough for the 5 of us, as the kids would not eat a full adult portion each.

I did not order using the regular method as I had to email my contact my choice and also delivery instructions. My order appeared to be dealt with efficiently and I received an email to remind me that my box would be arriving and it stated the delivery instructions that Hello Fresh had recorded for me, sadly these were not the same ones I had provided.

Boxes can be delivered to your door on a Tuesday or Thursday and will arrive between 9am and 4pm, time slots are not available, so you either need to be in to receive the box or to have allocated somewhere safe for it to be left.

The three meals for 4 persons box costs £59.00 including delivery and you literally do not need anything else to complete your meals except oil, salt and pepper. That works out at roughly £20 per day and £5.00 per person. This is higher than we would normally spend but the quality is good and if you like things made simple for you then I don’t think it is that extortionate. I can see Hello Fresh being really popular with couples without kids who work long hours but still enjoy cooking.

My box arrived on the day it was scheduled and the food was very well packed, I probed the meat to test the temperatures and it was fine for delivery, the chicken was at 6.7 degrees which is slightly higher than I might have liked but I think this was because the plastic carton is too large and the ice packs had difficulty reaching the meat. The other meat products were perfect at 4 degrees. The box looked good and the food temping, my issue was that two out of the three meals in the box where not what I had ordered.

With the classic box, you can order your 3 or 5 meals and then there are swaps available if you think that something might not be popular.  The swaps I had specifically requested did not arrive with me.  I emailed my contact at Hello Fresh straight away and she was very apologetic but here I am now over two weeks later and I have not heard another word, I hope this is not their normal customer service.  Had I of paid for these meals I would have kicked up a massive fuss as I ended up with two meals that I knew my family would not eat and I gave away unwanted food – like duck, lemons, rocket, radishes etc.

The ingredients appeared to be good in the main and I was happy with the portion sizes except the new potatoes, I felt the were skimpy, what you see in the bag below is supposed to be enough for 2 people and one of them is green so needs chopping off. I'm not sure if you can see either, on the recipe card it shows about 9 potatoes as the portion for 2 people, whereas I was sent 5.

The one meal I had ordered I did make following the recipe card included and it was excellent, my husband and I really enjoyed it. I did find it slightly odd to take the meat out of sausages and to fry it as mini meatballs but it worked!

In conclusion, I would not order a Hello Fresh meal box again for a number of reasons. Firstly I am not impressed with their customer service and sending the wrong meals, second I can cook better meals for much less cost and as I have the time to do so it would be silly not to and lastly the meal selection is just too fancy for my average family.

As I said before if you are a busy Working couple who want easy restaurant quality meals that you can cook within about 30 minutes then Hello Fresh might well suit you. Try a box out and use HELLOPAR1 for £10 off your first box.

We were sent this box free of charge for the purpose of this review. I have not been instructed what to write and I remain honest.

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How do you minimise food waste? Any good leftover recipes for me?

Over the last couple of years the amount of food waste that an average house generates has really started to concern me. I don't want to be responsible for wasting the precious resources we have and I want to do better to ensure I am doing my part to look after my family responsibility.

This isn't a blog post to make you feel bad though or to tell you all the wonderful things I do that mean we are not wasting anything, this is quite a new area to me and I'd love to hear your stories and to find out what you do to minimise waste and to ensure you use everything you have and if I'm honest I want to do it without much effort. I'm not a fancy cook and I like things to be simple.

Over the last year or so when I have cooked too much we have generally portioned up meals for one and I have frozen them for a friend to take home. She lives alone and relies on the food bank so my single meals were just perfect for her.

Just before we moved I used up everything in my freezer by creating a pot luck dinner and it was a tad eclectic but the kids enjoyed it! You'll notice that I didn't even bother getting some of it out of the pots it was frozen in. We had savoury mince and vegs, beef stew with veg, chicken stew with veg, some leftover rice, ready mash potato and peas. Al straight from the freezer.

As you can see Miss M fancies a bit of everything and it turned out to be a pretty healthy meal with protein, carbs and vegetables. A yoghurt afterwards and we had all the food groups covered!

On holiday last week with my parents I was flicking through my Dad's Sun paper and I came across an article about Zero Waste Week and this peaked my interest, what a great challenge to try and have no waste at all. This is certainly something for me to aim towards, with the kids going back to school and routine starting again I can menu plan.

Thinking about zero waste got me thinking about using up my leftovers in some creative recipes and Aly pointed me over to a fabulous and inspiring blog a few days back and there are some great budget recipes on there. The zero waste week site also had some good recipes to ensure you can use everything up, I really liked the look of the 'use it all up nut loaf'.

I think one of the best tips for reducing food waste is to ensure that portions served are only adequate ones and not ones that are far too large. How much of a difference would it make to my waistline if I started to control the portion sizes in this house - a great deal I'd imagine!

And I can't write this post without adding in a mention for Karen from the Rubbish Diet, she has been around blogging for as long as me and I've met her a couple of times and she seems a great lady. I've never really investigated the Rubbish Diet but I think it is high time.

At the moment I'm making changes having just moved to this new house, I'm not working and I have some time on my hands so when better than to sort out my families eating habits and our waste management too.

If you have any links to great leftover recipes you use or any tips for me about how to reduce my food waste then please do leave me a comment.

Thanks, Mich x

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Reasons to be Cheerful 1,2,3 - Week 18

Hello and welcome back to Reasons to be Cheerful.  Week 18 and this year is passing so quickly, I have to say that my year had been great so far....  long may that last!  How has yours been?  Chances are that if you are here joining in you can probably find something to be happy and grateful about!

Keeping it simple this week, here are my 3 reasons for being a happy lady!

1.  Re-discovering my love of marmite on toast and finding that my little ladies love it too!

2. A hands on family day at the farm.

3.  Washable floors!  Up until last summer I had a cream carpet running through my lounge and dining room - can you even imagine what it looked like??

Over to you, what is making you happy this week?  Share with us your reasons to be cheerful in whatever way you fancy!

Shw some blogger love and visit other people who have linked out.  Tweet your post using #R2BC and then we can all find it!

If you want to put the R2BC badge on your blog, please do feel free to.  You can get the code from HERE and you can read all about Reaosns to be Cheerful there too if you are new to this.

Wish Me Luck!

So today has been a good day and I pray this may continue for a long time. I need all the prayers, positive thoughts, luck etc etc that I can get to be able to crack this demon!

But for today things are OK, as today I am back on the band wagon.

• I did not eat on my emotions today


• I did not eat as I was lonely today


• I did not eat as I was bored today


• I did not eat as I was angry today


• I did not eat for any reason other than the fact that I have to eat to live.

Sounds boring? It might be but it is completely necessary for me, a compulsive overeater. I have been out of control the last couple of months. I have known that I have been on a slippy slide into the food but I have not felt able to do anything about it. Boy, does it take a lot of mental effort to be good around food and to abstain from unhealthy behaviours towards food.

I actually feel as if I am starting from scratch again. My weight this morning was 16st 6lb, this is about a stone less than my heaviest weight but about a stone heavier than my lowest recent weight last year. I hope to see the scales go down, the waistbands loosen and the smile on my face expand over the next few months. I feel very positive and ready to give my willfullness up today. This is a big step in itself. I must remember not to get ahead of myself and to stay living in the day - For Today is one of the slogans from my ED meetings and it is very pertinent - I can do today things that might horrify me if I thought I would have to do them forever.

I really enjoyed taking time to read when I woke this morning, first my ED literature and then my Bible. This and chatting to God first thing this morning set me up for a good day. I must make time for this each day. It is a discipline I had got very good at but then in the last month or so even that had slipped away - it was just easier not to bother! But who said life had to be easy?

A good couple of days

Who knows that has changed. I think all that effort I made to get to my much needed ED meeting on Thursday night in the snow is paying dividends. This is day 2 abstinent - no chocolate, sweets, biscuits, cakes or ice cream. Thank you Lord. There has been so many times in the last couple of days when I have been offered things or had things available that I wanted to eat but I just had to think of how wonderful it feels to be abstinent, it means such a lot to me. Far more than a 5 minute fix of chocolate does. I feel slimmer and more in control.

It was hard at my Mother in Laws (MIL) today as she has so much yummy stuff there and she always cooks far in excess of what is needed, but I ate a moderate meal and stayed to my food plan, avoiding all my no-go foods.

My period has arrived today and I am finding that when I eat better I have less pain, which is great. It has been a tough day today in general, so again it is even more excellent that by Gods grace I have stayed abstinent. Our shower pump appears to have broken, I have lost one of my lovely pandora style bracelets, I can not get the video camera footage to make a movie and get onto CD (this is my third attempt in just over a year, having spent about 30 hours doing this!!!!! grrr) and these are all things that would normally seem unmanageable and drive me to food - but not today!

For today, I am sane and wish to get well and to stop eating compulsively. Thank you Lord.

Food Plans

My food sponsor has gone away on holiday and I do not want to pester her, so I will write my food plan on here each day and then update it to see how I have done.

Today - 6th Nov
Plan is - porridge and 2 crumpets for brekkie, vege soup, 3 ryvita and cheese for lunch then an apple, tea is jacket potato with tuna mayo and sweetcorn and salad. Then plain yoghurt with some prunes in it.

Whoops, I have forgotten to report on my foods plans for the last couple of days but all has been going well. What I have actually eaten today (8th Nov) is -
Shreddies, 1 crumpet, banana, roast pork dinner with yorkshire puddings, scrambled eggs on 2 toast. So as you can see it is not that I am missing out on nice food, I am still eating well, just cutting out the crap.

9th Nov -
Yesterday I had - porridge, bagel, chicken salad, yoghurt, chicken and veg stir fry and a granola bar. I kept to plan! yay

10th Nov -
Plan today is - oat krunchies, bagel (whcih I have kept to so far) and planned is lunch chiken sub roll, crisps, grapes and then for tea ??? as Adam is cooking but I will stick to one moderate plate and then some tinned fruit and custard afterwards.

Getting a buzz!

Been thinking this morning about how much I look to stupid things to 'feel better'. Nothing too untoward you understand, basically at the core I am a good girl and of course nowadays a good Christian girl (we need to use the term girl quite loosely, as I am now 35, coming on 36! lol).

The buzz I am talking about tends to be sought from either food or shopping and the more I think about why I seek either it seems to be to try and make myself feel better about me. I am really not so sure what I have to feel glum about but somewhere along the line I am not as happy as I should be. I do find that quite hard to come to terms with as I know so many people have far harder lives than I do.

I am sure if there was a psych here they would say that we are all different and I must acknowledge my problems and deal with them, not compare them to other peopels as we all have different needs and tolerance levels. So in a hope of being a more rounded person and a better parent/ wife/ friend I will try and acknowledge my problems and I think attending my Thursday meetings is a big step towards that.

Might be back later to add to this......................... will think on it.