Eat plenty and healthy: vegan budget meal plan for less than 5 euros a day
Vegan budget meal: who said it had to be expensive?
Sure, one can go and buy all fancy products, supplements and foods that come from the other side of the world and witness their grocery store receipt explode.
Or, one can stick to simpler rotation of affordable and nutrition-packed foods and still leave the dining room satiated and satisfied, without compromising on the macro and micro-nutrient density. Sounds appealing for long term health, both physical and financial!
But is it sustainable? Can one person consistently eat on a budget, get enough calories, energy and secure a well-rounded diet?
In the spirit of the curious diabetic, I audited the cost and the nutritional profile of everything I ate for a week.
Spoiler: yes, it is possible. In fact, it is much easier than I expected. Stay with me, I’ll show you how it went!
The 5 euros a day meal plan
Eating on a budget and bulking
Let me quickly give you some context first. I am currently a calorie-burning machine, as I am increasing the volumes of my endurance activities (running and cycling) and of my strength training. This alone was a bit of a concern, since I was not sure I would be able to eat enough calories and meet my carbohydrates (around 350g-400g/ day) and proteins (around 100g/day) requirements for 5 euros a day.
I thus defined some clear rules for the challenge to be successful from a financial, health and energy perspective:
Eat no less than 2200kcal per day.
Get good nutrition: rotate around food that contain good micronutrients. Focus on the cruciferous vegetables (daily 12, except not daily but once every other day or so).
Never exceed 5 euros per day.
Vegan budget meal plan: the menu
Next, I defined a list of foods among which I would rotate, as well as their cost and calorie content per KG. I selected both calorie dense items (the bulk of every meal) to meet the macronutrients targets, and nutrient-packed ones (like the ones listed in the Daily Dozen challenge) to check the micronutrients boxes.
This is the list of the ingredients I combined in my meals this week:
Note:
- Cost/KG for leafy and frozen vegetables is the average of the mentioned items.
- Kcal/KG were taken from the nutrition-facts of each food item.
Vegan budget meals: rules and principles
In terms of meal composition, I followed these two simple principles:
Whole Food, Plant Based.
80% of each meal should be a calorie-dense food (potatoes, lentils, chickpeas, oats…). Since these are also the cheapest in terms of cost/KG, making them the main item of each meal is crucial to keep the cost under control.
The remaining 20% of the plate should be reserved to a mix of cruciferous vegetables and other micronutrients packed foods.
In between meals, I usually snacked on 2 or 3 apples/bananas.
Each meal was completed with herbs, spices and powders. These included: black pepper, turmeric, garlic, onion, cinnamon, nutritional yeast, spirulina, maca, beetroot cacao and açai powders. I also consumed flaxseeds and chia seeds regularly.
Results
Plant based meals on a budget for a type 1 diabetic: some ideas
Here are some examples of whole food, plant based, energetic and cheap meals that will replenish your body and your spirit with good energy! Guaranteed! 😁
200g of red lentils in tomato sauce served with brussels sprouts, carrots, green beans and a little drizzle of some soy cream topping.
300g of peas, 500g of potatoes, half a cauliflower, 300 grams of carrots (and hummus while taking the picture).
200g of black beans, 250g of carrots, some tomato sauce and some extra frozen cauliflowers.
These pictures are all from my dinners. I usually broke my fast with a big fat 1300kcal oatmeal. I am not posting a picture of it because it’s just too ugly even for my poor standards. It tastes amazing, but it’s just ugly and the esteem I have for my readers impedes me to destroy their eyes with my incapacity to make a meal look good. However, if you trust me, here’s what I throw into it:
200g of oats
200g of bananas (plus some apples or pears)
Cacao powder
200ml of soy milk
5-10g of flaxseeds
Nutritional content
This is cronometer.com report for the past week, which looks pretty good to me. The calorie estimation is probably even more accurate than the one I reported in the table above.
Note that I am taking supplements for vitamin-D twice a month and vitamin-B12 everyday.
Conclusions
I am very satisfied with the results! For only 3.85 euros a day, I ate an average of 2600kcal, splitted as:
400g of carbs
100g of protein
40g of fats
I met all my nutrition goals, had plenty of energy, ate good quality meals, all made with very simple ingredients everyone can find at their local grocery store…and I still have a margin of 1.15 euros! In the coming weeks I will make some changes, vary the ingredients and add some calories. The goal is always to have a lot of different colours in the plate, which means a lot of different antioxidants and micronutrients. I will add some purple (cabbage, beetroots), yellow (corn), and vary my cruciferous vegetables.
Two final very important things I must mention.
First, eating on a restricted budget forced me to be very selective with the foods I bought, which meant that there was no budget for processed foods of any kind. Not only did this clean up my diet, which was already quite fine before, anyway.
Centring my nutrition on just whole, unprocessed real foods gave me an energy that just felt of a superior level. Never before had I ate this clean, and never before I felt so good in my head and in my body. I am talking about longer bouts of sharp, laser-focused mental work that felt almost effortless, and peak performance in my physical exercises, always refuelled by a truly restoring recovery.Second, my blood glucose levels were just unbeatable: an average of 117, in range for 97% of the time. Amazing.
I was just trying to eat on a budget, and found a whole new universe of mental and physical energy.
Not bad, not bad at all.
I think I will happily continue on this ‘budget’ eating thing. I have a feeling that both my health and my wallet will appreciate.
Why don’t you give it a try too?
Deep Dive
Looking for some good plant based recipes? I highly suggest you give this Vegan Chili a try.
I recently did, and…oh, I think I’ll stop writing and start cooking again! Enjoy!
