A friend forwarded me a link to the Sainsburys Feed Your Family for £50 website because I was constantly complaining about the price of groceries. Apparently I need to learn how to economise, because the shopping bill for Tineladia and I is bigger than the shopping bill of a family of four.
I didn’t expect much from looking at the site – at least nothing that would help us. Our big shopping bill comes from lots of milk, lots of fresh (locally reared) meat for Tineladia, organic fruit and veg, and supplements. We try to eat real food most of the time, but we do need to top up with supplements otherwise we just wouldn’t be able to keep up with our training.
I did think that there would be some meal plans on there that might be useful – perhaps some cheap recipes that I could alter to include more expensive ingredients. Sadly, the meals on the plan are pretty limited.
The plan has each family member having something like two slices of toast with jam for breakfast, one sandwich for lunch, and a cooked meal for dinner. Totalling up the nutritional information, you end up getting 1,600 Calories per day - with the majority of the calories coming from carbs, and not all that much protein. Healthy fats are lacking too.
I’ll admit, I eat 1,400 calories per day six days a week, and have a re-feed day where I eat a lot more than that, but I’m currently trying to cut fat without losing muscle, and my maintenance is pretty low because I’m so small. Tine’s maintenance is about 2,400 – if he followed the Sainsbury’s diet he’d end up weak and tired pretty quickly – he might lose a little fat, but in the long term he’d have far worse body composition, and there’s no way he could train six times a week on a diet like that.
I admit that the diet isn’t designed for athletes, but even my non-training friends couldn’t follow that. I calculated the nutritional needs of a sedentary, overweight friend of mine, and it came out that he should diet at around 2,100 for slow, steady weight loss. Going all the way down to 1,600 would have him feeling tired, hungry, and full of cravings in no time. He wouldn’t be able to stick with it.
I give props to Sainsbury’s for trying, but I’d rather see a £60 or£70 meal plan that offered more variety, and better customisation options, suggesting things that you could add to the meals to bulk them up a bit – not just bread either, how about wholegrain rice, frozen vegetables, sweet potatoes, etc? I like to keep wholegrain crackers and peanut butter on standby as a snack, for example.
The idea of cheap, healthy eating is a nice one, but I fear they’ve tried too hard with this one, and lost out on a good chance to help people learn about healthy eating. Instead of learning that good food doesn’t have to be expensive, people may take away the message that you have to compromise on quantity (and satiety) in order to eat “good” food on a budget. That’s not good.
A friend forwarded me a link to the Sainsburys Feed Your Family for £50 website because I was constantly complaining about the price of groceries. Apparently I need to learn how to economise, because the shopping bill for Tineladia and I is bigger than the shopping bill of a family of four.
I didn’t expect much from looking at the site – at least nothing that would help us. Our big shopping bill comes from lots of milk, lots of fresh (locally reared) meat for Tineladia, organic fruit and veg, and supplements. We try to eat real food most of the time, but we do need to top up with supplements otherwise we just wouldn’t be able to keep up with our training.
I did think that there would be some meal plans on there that might be useful – perhaps some cheap recipes that I could alter to include more expensive ingredients. Sadly, the meals on the plan are pretty limited.
The plan has each family member having something like two slices of toast with jam for breakfast, one sandwich for lunch, and a cooked meal for dinner. Totalling up the nutritional information, you end up getting 1,600 Calories per day - with the majority of the calories coming from carbs, and not all that much protein. Healthy fats are lacking too.
I’ll admit, I eat 1,400 calories per day six days a week, and have a re-feed day where I eat a lot more than that, but I’m currently trying to cut fat without losing muscle, and my maintenance is pretty low because I’m so small. Tine’s maintenance is about 2,400 – if he followed the Sainsbury’s diet he’d end up weak and tired pretty quickly – he might lose a little fat, but in the long term he’d have far worse body composition, and there’s no way he could train six times a week on a diet like that.
I admit that the diet isn’t designed for athletes, but even my non-training friends couldn’t follow that. I calculated the nutritional needs of a sedentary, overweight friend of mine, and it came out that he should diet at around 2,100 for slow, steady weight loss. Going all the way down to 1,600 would have him feeling tired, hungry, and full of cravings in no time. He wouldn’t be able to stick with it.
I give props to Sainsbury’s for trying, but I’d rather see a £60 or£70 meal plan that offered more variety, and better customisation options, suggesting things that you could add to the meals to bulk them up a bit – not just bread either, how about wholegrain rice, frozen vegetables, sweet potatoes, etc? I like to keep wholegrain crackers and peanut butter on standby as a snack, for example.
The idea of cheap, healthy eating is a nice one, but I fear they’ve tried too hard with this one, and lost out on a good chance to help people learn about healthy eating. Instead of learning that good food doesn’t have to be expensive, people may take away the message that you have to compromise on quantity (and satiety) in order to eat “good” food on a budget. That’s not good.