Family Challenge – Can you eat healthy on the average UK family weekly budget? 100 days of Proper Home Cooking

Share this post

This week myself and Husband looked back at our busy lifestyles and as we already regularly see where we can make improvements to enrich our family’s lives together, I felt it was time to try and improve my own eating habits in particular. I had been inspired to pick up a copy of Cameron Diaz’s excellent book “The Body Book” and also “How I quit sugar” by Sarah Wilson.

Pick up your copies at Amazon:
The Body Book by Cameron Diaz
How I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson

My habits and patterns aren’t bad by any means, we eat home cooked meals as a family nearly every day except special treat days out and that food contains vegetables, fresh meats and lots of love. My mum was a wonderful solid cook so I learnt to expect home cooked meals each day from her, and expect nothing less from myself feeding my people I love.

But I do have the honest realisation that I eat too much sugar, love fizzy juices, love chocolate and generally in the past this was never an issue as I never put on weight. However, I notice that my body is telling me to improve, for example my body warns me now if I don’t drink enough “clean” liquids or if I don’t eat enough good healthy foods I don’t feel my best.

This week there seemed to be outrage when a leader of a UK political party couldn’t give the exact amount of money the average Uk family spends on food a week:

Weekly UK shopping unknown by Ed Miliband

I didn’t find the amount that shocking. Our family lives by budgets as this is the only way I know how to manage our money so we have as much as possible to spend on fun living life stuff. To hear the average amount is £100 a week actually is more than what we allocate, we usually spend about £80 including feeding our two cats. If you are interested in how I use budgets to manage our monthly income, I will share this over upcoming posts.

So with both these thoughts in mind, trying to be personally healthy and improve my eating patterns and the fact that I wondered is that very idea possible on the average weekly budget – I set our family this challenge for 100 days. I was greatly inspired by the wonderful blog 100 days of real food and use some of the tips there for entering the world of better eating and less bad food for our family. Please feel free to check it out!

And so here it is….as of tomorrow we will do just that and I am excited to keep this blog updated about how we get on and the honest feedback. Who knows? I might learn a thing or two along the way.