Whole30 is amazing. A super easy and rewarding journey filled with absolutely delicious food that you'd be happy to eat for the rest of your life.

Jk.

It's really a time consuming, difficult monster that will take over your life and kitchen (and keep it in such a state of towering dirty dishes and pots, you will contemplate burning the whole thing down and moving to a different state). And that's not even counting the cost which can be enormous if you're not expecting it.

But after five (or six?) times, you start to come up with strategies. So here is the ultimate way to do whole thirty on a budget (at least in my experience), when the desire to do whole thirty is tempered by your lack of money. If you're trying to do the most inexpensive Whole30, this is the secret:

Don't be picky.

For real though, in this day and age, you can find inexpensive, cheap food for whole30 but it requires reversing the order you do things.

i.e you type in "Whole30" on Pinterest and get hundreds of pictures of beautiful, mouth-watering dishes. If you join any groups or follow any whole30'ers on Instagram you see platefuls and recipes for delicious foods.

And maybe they work for those people without spending too much money, but in order to do Whole30 cheaply, you have to completely reverse your thinking. Instead of picking what you want to eat and making a grocery list, you buy 1. Meat, 2. Veggies, 3. Fat that can be procured on sale and inexpensively.

What this might look like for a family (scale up or down accordingly)

STEP 1

40 lbs of chicken. $50 (business center Costco or online co-op or restaurant supply)
16 lbs Beef brisket or roast $40 (same as above)
16 lbs Pork Shoulder $16 (any store should have some cut of pork on sale for around .99/lb
4 lbs Applewood sausage $12 (Walmart)
4lbs Bacon (as healthy as you can buy...ignore the sugar if you need to) $12
10 dozen eggs $14 (Costco or Walmart currently)
24 cans coconut milk $25 (Costco or ethnic grocery store)
6 lbs frozen berries $20
6 heads of Romaine $3
20lb bag Carrots $5
50 lb bag sweet potatoes $14
7lbs frozen broccoli $8
5 butternut squash $5 (99 Cent store)
25lbs onions $4 (Costco)
Coconut oil $10 (Walmart)
Garlic-$2

Total $220 per month
$220/4people= $55
That's $55 for one person per month, not week.

Cook up massive amounts of meat at once, and steam/saute/roast veggies on Sunday night if you are able. Then every night, figure out what veggie and protein you're having the next day. Sample: Squash and sausage for breakfast, broccoli, and chicken for dinner, sweet potato and roast for dinner. Simple, but effective.

STEP 2

You can totally eat delicious, nutritious, flavorful food that gives you an adequate amount of calories for a month with the above menu. But most people have a little more money than that...even most food stamp programs will give you $50/week per person. So fill in the edges with whatever is on sale...

tomatoes
bananas
zucchini
oranges
apples
celery
ginger
Lemons/limes

Often give you the most bang for your buck as far as expanding the things you can cook.
Avocados, homemade mayo, ghee, nuts, coconut aminos, fancy oils etc are things that DO NOT give you the most bang for your buck. And while they're nice, they're also expensive and unnecessary even though they're super popular in the Whole30 world. If you really are trying to do Whole 30 on a budget, google recipes based on what ingredients you have vs just browsing, because you'll get depressed at all the super expensive food everyone else is eating.

CONCLUSION

I firmly believe anyone can afford Whole30, but you have to have a mindset of abundance. Imagine you are a wealthy medieval lord who is collecting rents from the peasants and there was a bumper crop of sweet potatoes and onions that year. Be amazed that you can have chicken and beef on the same day. Eat like royalty because it's 2017, don't feel sorry for yourself that everyone else is eating something different. In the grand scheme of the world, avocados aren't more important than coconuts, and the healthy fat from the later is cheaper. We're so sucked in by trends and doing what people around us are doing, we lose sight of the big picture which is this: There is an excess of food in the Northern Hemisphere. Find it, procure it, and eat it with a grateful attitude. Eat veggies and meat for breakfast (pretend some Viking ghost is looking down at you and nodding with satisfaction). Live above the fray.

And reap the benefits of sleeping better, having more energy, thinking more clearly and equalizing to a healthy weight. Even if you just do it once as an experiment, I think it's a bit like shaving your head or getting a tattoo (just the less permanent version). The whole world just looks sort of different. It shows you patterns in your body you may not have noticed before. And it builds healthy systems and habits.

Have fun and if you hate it, feel free to tell me so.

RANDOM FOOTNOTES

-If you're single or can't afford to buy in bulk like this plan requires, find a few friends who will do it too and split it with you.
-If you live in a big city, find the restaurant supply district and figure out how to get plugged in.
-If you don't have a Costco membership, find a friend who does or see above.
-This plan assumes you have a fully stocked spice cupboard, but if you don't... salt, garlic and fat cover a multitude of sins but I would recommend at least getting some vinegar (which thankfully is cheap).

I used to hate it when my parents sat us all down for a "family pow wow". They were epic come to Jesus talks that usually ended with us all getting up early, doing more chores and sorting out whatever major attitude problems were shaping up into WWIII. I loathed them so much, that early in our marriage when Jim casually mentioned "let's pow wow" I broke out into a cold sweat and treated the poor man like he'd just suggested a flogging post and torture rack.

Now I have four kids, and although the word "pow wow" is still strictly forbidden, I realized I totally do the same thing. Negotiating with a two year old is a slippery slope where you think peeling a banana a certain way or watching a show in the morning is not a big deal, and then before you know it you're standing on your head, holding your mouth a certain way and angling the banana so it correctly lines up with the earth's magnetic field as you peel it at 5 am while you watch the same dinosaur train episode. ...and you don't even know how it got this bad.

Multiply that by four, throw in the end of CC and state testing and it's no wonder people commonly burn out this time of year.

So I sat all of the kids down and told them we were having a week reset of absolutely no fun (you have to set the standard super low so something like playing math bingo feels like you're getting away with murder). We're doing nothing but learning poetry, reading books, doing math and re-learning how to play nicely with our siblings. I cleaned up our food while I was at it, because I figured you might as well bum everyone out with one swift kick in the pants. Our diet had slipped from pizza occasionally and cold cereal as an emergency backup to such a high level of consumption that they need to come up with a new scientific classification of consumers for us: Herbivores, Carnivores, Omnivores and the Junkavores.

It had gotten so bad even Jamie was craving healthy food. He's become so big and responsible this year (mostly) that he can babysit for short periods and go places independently. So when he kept bugging me and bugging me for lentil soup, I finally just handed him my card and told him if he wanted it that bad he was going to have to do it himself.

...and I was surprised he called my bluff, but he did. He walked to the grocery store and asked someone where the leeks and lentils were located, used the self checkout and was home in ten minutes total. Jim and I teased him later that the only reason someone didn't get him into trouble was because they probably had never met a potentially troublesome sixth grader shopping for lentils and leeks. Ahem.

I wonder sometimes if other families have to go through the monumental, boot slogging task of feeling like they have to troubleshoot every.single.area of their kids' lives. Oftentimes it seems like my kids only struggle struggle struggle, and never succeed. Everything needs extra work and effort, nothing comes easy. We were back to forming ABC's today like we're in Kindergarten to fix a bunch of letter reversals that have been cropping up lately. William probably needs speech therapy too, but there is a limit to how many "therapies" one can juggle in a week, and his issues are mild (in comparison). But see? It's a constant state of triage on who needs the most help. Of course after three kids who needed speech therapy to even start talking, I feel like at this point I should just write my own. "Speech Bootcamp For Stubborn Toddlers: The at home guide for parents who want to hear something other than 'EEEEEEEEGHH!' all day"

But hey, two days in and everyone is doing a lot better (food wise, school wise, and behavior wise) so maybe my parents were on to something with their "pow wows". And honestly there are worse things than sitting home all day eating watermelon and homemade beef jerky while you build epic train tracks and read Laddie aloud. But in defense of electronics and Netflix... Jamie said there wasn't one thing on his common core state test that wasn't in Wild Kratz and Magic Schoolbus. So there.