Saving Money With A Paleo Diet: How To "Whole 30" For $10 A Day

The Whole 30 Diet - a Paleo diet, can help eliminate your unhealthy food habits and unnecessary spending. Here's how to Whole 30 for under $10 a day.

You may have some crunchy friends who've been raving about the Whole30 Program.

Maybe your Instagram is full of yummy looking meals with hashtags like: #Whole30 #healthyeating #delicious.

Maybe you've heard of the mythical dragon's blood that happens about halfway through, giving you a serious energy boost.

Maybe you're just stick of having an upset stomach most of the time and you've heard this can help.

Developed by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, the Whole 30 is a Paleo based diet that eliminates a lot of foods that have negative impacts on your health. Some foods that many people consider "healthy" can also impact your energy levels and gut health, so for 30 days, those are stripped from your diet too.. By removing all these foods from your diet, you're able to reset your body over 30 days and feel the real effects of how the food you eat controls your metabolism, energy levels, sleep cycles, and more.

Whole 30 rules:

• Do not consume sugar of any kind, real or artificial (ex. Splenda, Equal, honey, agave, maple syrup, coconut sugar, etc.)
• Do not consume alcohol in any form, not even for cooking
• Do not eat grains (ex. rye, barley, corn, rice, quinoa, etc.)
• Do not eat legumes (ex. beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, etc.)
• Do not eat dairy, with the exception of clarified butter or ghee (including cow, goat, sheep or the milk of any other animal)
• Do not consume carrageen, MSG or sulfates
• Do not try to re-create baked goods, junk food, or treats with "approved" ingredients
• You are not allowed to step on the scale or take any body measurements for the duration of the program

And here's the small list of exceptions that you can have:

• Clarified Butter or Ghee
• Fruit juice can be used as sweetener
• Certain legumes that are more pod than bean (ex: snap peas, snow peas, green beans).
• Vinegar that doesn't contain gluten
• Salt

One of all these restrictions are in place, you may start to wonder what on earth you can eat. Something about the Whole 30 makes folks jump right into thinking about Whole Foods and suddenly all you can see are dollar bills, making the program seem to expensive to be worth it. 

Getting Started

There are a few staples you're going to want int your kitchen to make this month more bearable. The best piece of advice for making the Whole 30 budget friendly is to do 90% of your shopping at a Walmart or regular grocery store and then swing by a Whole Foods or an organic grocery store for just a few key items that are harder to find elsewhere. 

It's worth nothing that some specialty items, Whole Foods actually does have the best price despite it being an item you can find in multiple stores. Also, Thrive Market often has larger sizes that break down to less per ounce or pound. Despite that, we've selected the cheapest option that will get you through 30 days, not necessarily the cheapest option if you were likely to use the entire product up continuing beyond 30 days.

Remember

Assuming you had none of these ingredients already in your cabinets and you decided to fully splurge on the items, your grand total for the Whole 30 would come out to $9.50 per day. It would be very easy to manipulate those numbers and swap out some prices for different ones or upgrade on some meats and skip some splurges. 

Of course, if you're not worried about your budget, there's a world of other foods you could eat in the Whole 30 spectrum including items like the $70 Epic Whole 30 Starter Kit full of different kinds of jerky, Naked Bacon for $9.99 a pop, or even a subscription to Pre-Made Paleo for the full 30 days that comes in at a whopping $995.00.

However not everyone can afford to shell out nearly $1,000 to feed themselves for the month, and this article proves that you don't have to - for $9.50 a day you can reap all the health benefits of the Whole 30.