Day 79 - Another change up

Hey, I like doing things a bit different, so starting today I'm going to make my daily post before my workout. That way I might have some more interesting things to talk about other than my workout, and I won't waste away the wee hours of the morning finishing up my posts.

Today I thought I would share a little bit of data that I've collected.
For the budget conscious shredder, eating healthy may not come cheap. Some healthy food is cheaper, but others not so much. I think the biggest change that I noticed was that I was actually eating more food than before, and a lot more meat, since I tried having a source of lean protein at every meal.

Sources of lean protein are probably the largest part of my grocery bill, so I've kept a few tabs on the following staples, the stuff that I pretty much always have on hand, and end up buying even when it isn't on sale.

For some reason there's a lot of blank space here:

Food	Unit Size	#Servings	Protein/ Serving	Cost/ Unit	Cost/ 25g protein	Cost/ serving
Whole Eggs	dozen	12	6.3	2.25	0.74	0.19
Extra Lean Ground Beef	1 lb	4	21.1	2.99	0.89	0.75
Top Sirloin	1 lb	4	34.4	5.99	1.09	1.50
Chicken Breast (can)	1 tin	2	15	1.33	1.11	0.67
Egg Whites	dozen	2	21	2.25	1.34	1.13
Liquid Egg White	500 g	10	5	2.69	1.35	0.27
Protein Powder	1 kg	32	21	36.48	1.36	1.14
Cottage Cheese	500 g	4	15	3.29	1.37	0.82
Canned Tuna	1 tin	2	15	1.99	1.66	1.00
Chicken Breast	1 bag	10	22	19.99	2.27	2.00
Canned Salmon	1 tin	2	19	3.79	2.49	1.90
Salmon	1 portion	1	28.8	2.99	2.60	2.99

All prices are in Canadian Dollars and are listed as the lowest price I've paid for them that I could find or knew of off the top of my head. If was a real nut, I'd keep running tallies and use an average price, but that's probably a little extreme. I use the cost/25g of protein metric because that is about what I aim for in my protein intake per meal. For others, this might be higher or lower, depending on your needs.

Some notes:
The cheapest on this list, whole eggs, doesn't really count as a lean protein since it includes the fatty yolk. I eat mostly whites, so the average price for my egg protein intake is somewhere in between the price for whites and whole eggs. The next lowest, extra lean ground beef, isn't as clean as the other lean proteins since it still has a higher fat content than the others, most of which is saturated. Surprisingly, protein powder, even with all the marketing jazz and supplement company markup, comes in fairly reasonable. But if you use it too much, you're missing out on the other good stuff that comes from eating real food as well as the thermic effect since you're usually taking it in liquid form.

I guess it doesn't really change my grocery shopping or eating habits too much, except I'm going to try and make more use of egg (whites) and not to completely avoid the ground beef. Top Sirloin actually looks like a decent source as well, it's just a matter of limiting the size of the steaks that is the trouble. It's easy to take a nice big piece of meat which is probably closer to two servings. I think my salmon consumption will go down a bit as well and just make sure I keep up with my flax oil. I could get cheaper tuna as well, but for some reason I trust the little bit more expensive stuff more.

Well, there you have it, a short, but not too scientific insight on my grocery shopping habits. If anyone else has some tips on getting cheap sources of quality lean protein, let me know!

...and now for today's pics:

Day 79