How to Eat Healthily for Under $30- The Dollar Tree Diet

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a Dollar Tree diet for a long time now. The idea would be to have a set budget for the week and use that budget to accomplish 3 things:

1. Purchase only non-processed foods.

2. Eat for an entire week while maintaining the correct proportion of carbohydrates, fats, and protein.

3. Consume adequate calories and fiber.

The purpose of my pursuit is to prove that you can eat healthy while on a budget. I set the weekly budget for myself at $30.

Here are my preliminary numbers:

I quickly realized that I was proportionally low on fat intake. I also realized I would need bananas and milk for my daily fruit smoothies. To supplement this I added the following items to my daily consumption.

Now that I had the totals I could figure out the percentage of each macronutrient; but I had a problem. Even though I copied the information directly from the packaging, the math was not adding up. There are 4 calories per carbohydrate and protein gram, and 9 calories per fat gram. When I converted the total grams into calories, I ended up with a daily total of 2,452; which is much higher than the advertised 1,939 calories. This is due to rounding. When a company posts the number of grams on the packaging, they round each gram to a “per serving” ratio to make the information easy to analyze at a glance. This works for the layman looking at only one serving, but when analyzing an entire week’s worth of food, the discrepancy becomes glaringly evident. Therefore I was left to ballpark the percentages.

I was very pleased with my quick run to the dollar tree. Even though I only spent $25, the net result was a reasonable distribution of macronutrients. Furthermore, I was able to maintain a calorie count at or near 2,000, and the chosen foods where primarily fruits and vegetables.

I plan to begin my diet tomorrow and eat only the things listed in the charts above for one week. I will keep you posted.