Living Well on a Budget

mtwadmin - Fri, August 27, 2010

Like many of us living in the twenty-first-century’s equivalent of the Dust Bowl, I operate on a strict budget.  At the same time, health, exercise, organic and natural foods, and other facets of a holistically sound life are major priorities to me.  Unfortunately, basic things such as exercise, a balanced diet, and even proper health care are still largely viewed as being exclusive luxuries of the upper-middle-class and above.

Generally, I get by okay, and even tend to eat better and get more regular exercise than most of my friends who make several times as much money as I do.  (When you only work part-time, it leaves you room to cook your meals from scratch and make daily yoga and bike-riding part of your routine.  It’s a trade-off, for sure.  I may not have an iPad, but I can do a mean king pigeon.)

But even if you work forty-hours a week or more, there are plenty of ways you can save money and still make healthy choices.  (Sometimes you can even save money by making healthy choices - riding a bike instead of taking a car or public transportation?  Score!)  All it takes is some ingenuity, creativity, research, and a little bit more work than walking into a store and swiping a credit card.  You don’t get that momentary consumer high that so many of us grew up knowing as our societal cocaine, but you do get the satisfaction of having made something for yourself, which, honestly, is so, so, so much better for your overall mental well-being. 

My friend Jess, an NYU Nutrition and Dietetics grad student, recently shared a recipe for homemade Larabars on her blog.  Larabars are those no-added-sugar, all-natural, fruit-and-nut “energy” bars that boast only three or four ingredients, usually some type of nut and some type of dried fruit.  So simple!  So natural!  And about $2.50 per bar!

If you threw one in your bag as a mid-afternoon snack only four times a week, that would be FORTY DOLLARS per month on these simple, natural little goodies.  When you read the ingredients, it seems so easy.  Dates, cashews, maybe some coconut or chocolate chips thrown in.  Well, sometimes things ARE as easy as they appear to be.  If you have a food processor, you can make your own version of Larabars at home, save a ton of money, and experiment with different fruits and nuts.  (I had success with prunes and apricots.)

The insanely simple recipe?  Throw some nuts and dried fruit in a food processor and blend until you can roll it into balls.  It takes about five minutes.  Really.  That’s it. 

These are Jess’s photos, but when I did it at home, they came out looking about the same.

These are so brown because they have chocolate chips blended in with them.  Before refrigerating them, I rolled a few of mine in coconut too, because I’m crazy like that. 

Yoga is another lifestyle choice that tends to be thought of as reserved for the financially well-off.  While classes and studios can be prohibitively expensive, once you have a foundation, the actual practice of yoga is free.  You don’t even technically need a mat, just a body and an understanding of the flow and breath of the poses.  Still, I can barely stand to read magazines like Yoga Journal because of the constant barrage of advertising for this or that yoga “product.”  Of course!  How did I ever attempt a downward dog without $69 organic cotton butt-flattering yoga pants in blush and pistacio!  At last my practice will be complete.

It drives me bonkers.  I recently went to City Sports because I was looking for a way to carry my yoga mat on my shoulder while I was riding my bike.  The bags they had were $25, which is about how much my mat was six years ago when I bought it.  There were also $50 mats that came with carrying “cords,” which you could not buy separately.  These cords were, essentially, a piece of rope with a slipknot tied in each end. 

So what did I do—punk-rock DIY modern dust-bowler that that I am?  I tied two slipknots in a piece of rope.  It works great.  And it probably cost around fifty cents.