Food Budgeting by Meal? Insight from The Biggest Loser

One of my favorite reality shows to watch is The Biggest Loser. You can’t not be motivated after you watch that show. Even if you don’t need to lose weight, watching those people working so hard to make a change in their lives, listening to the words of encouragement and great example from Bob Harper, Dolvett Quince and Jillian Michaels…..it’s just awesome.

In this week’s episode, there was an interesting organizational aspect to it. I posted before that one of my mini-goals this year is to get smarter with how I spend money on our grocery shopping. On this week’s show, they took the contestants to the grocery store and challenged them to buy healthy foods that would last them a week giving them a budget of $10 per day per person.

You can see the grocery lists for each team online but there is not a lot of detail about exactly what the teams ate to stay in budget.

The most shocking part of the shopping experience, however, were the comments from the contestants during the shopping challenge:

“I usually shop per day. I don’t shop for the week.”

“I have no idea what my family spends on groceries a week because I don’t grocery shop. I’m a fast food junkie. It’s so much easier and convenient . . . .”

“I don’t grocery shop at all. I don’t like grocery stores.”

“I have no idea what our grocery budget is back home.”

“I’m 24. I’m barely fresh out of college. I can look at the cart and pretty much eyeball when I’m not going to have enough money.”

I don’t think these contestants are much worse than the rest of us. In my case, I know how much we typically spend on groceries and other food in a month but I don’t break that down on a per meal basis. It takes a lot of time and effort to get to that level of financial (and shopping and health) sophistication.

I am going to start calculating how much some of our meals cost us. Below are two examples from recent meals.

Honestly, I am a little surprised at how low the cost of each meal is! This tells me that my frame of reference for food prices is restaurant food. Of course, the factor not mentioned above is waste. If I don’t eat that whole bag of spinach and throw half of it away, ideally I would factor in the half-eaten bag as an increased cost for each meal I actually did eat with the spinach.

Do you know how much your meals cost you? Do you prefer not to know? Please share in the comments.