Picture for nutritional info.
Since the comments indicate this is really a food budget challenge, let’s talk about that. What is your monthly budget for food? Do you have any dietary restrictions you want to target?
I target about $400/month for two big kids and two preschool aged kids, and largely manage to hit my target. I shop almost exclusively at Aldi, and our diets are very heavy in dairy, crackers, frozen veggies and involve a weekly taco night and pizza night. Oh and about a dozen or two sandwiches a week.
I often have toast or vanilla yogurt for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch. I’ve been trying to reduce sugars over the last couple of years (I’m not actually tracking it, but just watching for high values in any processed foods I eat, and making buying decisions partly based on the sugar content)
My budget at the moment is CAD$250 per month. 750g of cottage cheese a month would run me $225 at $7.49 a package. As others have indicated, it’s an unhealthily low amount of calories despite it meeting my protein requirements. The only dietary restriction that I need to target is getting enough protein for maintenance of muscle mass. The reasons are twofold: firstly, as I’ve indicated elsewhere, I have had issues with ED in the past. I fear that losing muscle mass would cause a relapse and I can’t afford that at present. More importantly, however, is that my current employment is fairly physical, so I can’t afford to get weaker either.
So, to summarize: $250/month, maximizing protein per dollar.
Issues with cottage cheese idea:
- Unfulfilling psychologically
- Potential for malnutrition/health complications
- Extremely low-calorie
Ideas to remedy the situation:
- Cheap carbs (potatoes, flour, pasta/ramen)
- Making things from raw (e.g. milk -> cottage cheese, flour -> bread)
- Cheap meat
I think animal protein needs to be a part of the solution. Tried vegetarianism in the past and I couldn’t function well on it. But all animal protein in Canada is expensive, either due to supply management (eggs and dairy), price gouging, supply and demand (e.g. price of chicken breast is ludicrous), or some other unknown factor(s). So plant based protein should also be part of the solution in spite of its lower quality. Others have suggested dried beans/lentils.
It would be worthwhile to make things from raw. I can save roughly a dollar per kg of cottage cheese if I make the cottage cheese myself from milk. I can also use the byproducts in the making of bread, furthering the value and capturing all protein. There will be a significant time cost in doing this.
At the moment we’re looking at a diet of homemade cottage cheese, bread, and beans. If I can save enough doing this then I could incorporate vegetables as well, but it might be better to just take a multivitamin and eat the psychological cost. This will only be for a month, potentially two, and hopefully not more. I think I can go that long without becoming too miserable. I’d love to hear some feedback if you have any.
(Bonus solution: find a better paying job.)
I can’t tell if you’re over-thinking, under-thinking, or just plain havent invested time into grocery planning.
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an 8kg bag of basmati or jasmine rice can be found for $15 (freshco), if you have one cup (dry, 200g) of rice that will last you 40 meals. It’s about 200 calories per serving and has vitamin B as well as a handful of minerals.
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Chicken can be found for $3/lb (food basics) or less if you are patient and shop around and is ~120g protein per lb of meat
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Add in some beans $2.97 at walmart for a 900g bag of dry kidney beans, each serving gets you fiber and protein, also 25 servings.
$110 per month and you have staples and 60+g of protein per day. That leaves $35 per week to shop sales/flash food/etc for fruit, veg, and other meat.
I have neither of those stores in my area. At Walmart, chicken is $20/kg like every other store.
Do you have any Asian/Indian/other ethnic grocers? Stores with a butcher counter? Are there farms nearby? you can troll whatever grocery stores you do have near you for last day of sale meats/produce and as long as you cook or freeze them the same day or the next day, they’re perfectly fine. From some of your comments, you live out west, maybe try to find a few friends to split a pig, that can get the price per pound way down.
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You’d become anemic from the lack of iron plus the blood loss from hemorrhoids due to lack of fiber.
Hemorrhoids is a preventable condition, you’re not supposed to sit there and push. Just get up and do drink water or eat fiber. Try hot coffee or warm milk or a yogurt drink. No one needs to suffer from hemorrhoids at all, I am surprised there are still people who do. Should be a unit in middle school health classes to not force shitting
Got mine along with my first baby. Another example of blaming women for legitimate health issues?
Agree about fiber, but more specifically, psyllium fiber like metamucil, and vegetable fiber have positive effects whereas nuts or seeds, especially flax, tear it open and cause bleeding even if it’s been healed for months. Yogurt can also be constipating, despite the claims of probiotics.
More to the point, there’s zero fiber in cottage cheese.
Got mine along with my first baby. Another example of blaming women for legitimate health issues?
Sorry to know that! I was only talking about hemorrhoids from forcing shitting. Didn’t know they could happen with child birth, but makes sense
You are not permitted hot coffee, warm milk, or a yogurt drink. You are permitted 750g of cottage cheese, each day, for a month.
I’ll take death thanks 🙏
Some people just randomly get hemmroids for no apparent reason
Only 960 kcal/day is a starvation diet.
If you have 0% body fat, lol.
Worst that will happen is you’ll lose some weight and probably recomp a bit but 4 weeks really isn’t enough to do anything. 8 minimum to even start to see changes in my experience.
Ymmv depending on bf %
Based on the label in the post, it’d be even worse than that, 750g would only be 720 kcal
Whoops!
do you get any supplemental liquid?
Anything non-caloric. Water, tea, coffee, diet soda, so on.
Removed by mod
Don’t tell me you think aspartame will kill him.
That’s a non-exhaustive list and does not reflect my actual dietary habits
What about crab juice
Uhh, well, it sounds interesting I guess.
If we’re making bad decisions, why not really make them bad
But getting the juice is so hard!
So I can’t answer your question exactly, but, as many here know at this point, I have been suffering through an illness where I have not eaten any solid food since last August (please no medical advice). Before I got, with the help of doctors, settled on a liquid diet of 6 Ensures and 4 V8s a day, I lost 80 pounds- 260 to 180, I was dizzy and lightheaded all the time from the lack of electrolytes, and while I still don’t have much energy and have to rest for a while after walking the dogs for half an hour, I couldn’t even walk a couple of blocks.
That said, my blood panels show everything is normal, so I’m clearly not dying. It’s not exactly a great quality of life, especially since our entire society is based around food in every conceivable way, but it is survivable. In fact, one good thing came out of it- I no longer have high blood pressure or high cholesterol, so I don’t have to take pills to counteract those anymore.
I’m sorry to hear you’re going through that. I can sort of imagine what you’re going through, and it’s certainly not fun, but it’s probably not a 1:1 situation. I really hope you get better though.
Thanks. Definitely not 1:1 but maybe sort of put you down the path?
Not entirely sure what you mean. Could you rephrase?
Sorry, I mean that I agree, it’s not a 1:1 comparison, but it might lead you down the road to finding the right sort of comparison by putting my experience with the experiences of others.
Oh yeah, true. I’ve already decided based on feedback that this isn’t a good way to meet my dietary needs without breaking the bank. I’m just proud to say that the extreme measures I’m considering aren’t due to an ED this time around. Just poverty this time.
Poverty sucks ass, I’ve been there. That said, you can get by for a long time with beans, rice and some veggies. Not a fun diet, but better than starving.
Well, that’s kinda the chief problem. Last time I did that I suffered brain fog the entire time. Same thing happened when I tried vegetarianism. And on top of that, I lost a surprising amount of muscle mass on beans and rice. I think I need more protein than that diet can offer. It’s just a shame that it’s so bloody expensive…
Why not just drink Soylent?
Because, as I said, this was settled with the help of doctors.
And, again, please no medical advice.
wait, you dont get liquid food from the hospital?
someone just won a month’s supply of cottage cheese.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKOvOaJv4GK-oDqx-sj7VVg – either this channel may visit you, or you visit the channel.
The episode will begin with a dramatically narrated,
HF is a <XYZ> years old <gender identifier>, and had <food> for a month! This is what happened next!Hmmm… potential payout?
You would be fine, you would need extra electrolytes and water.
120g of protein per day
36g of carbohydrates per day.
15g of fat per day.
You would lose weight, you’d be running at a calorie deficit. Assuming you had fat to start with everything would be fine. The protein levels are sufficient to maintain your muscle mass
You probably get bored of that food pretty quickly.
You’d also need a vitamin. And if you’re like me you’d probably want to break your keyboard in half and shove it down your throat until you can’t see it anymore; cottage cheese is gross even before it becomes monotous.
Why do so many people hate cottage cheese? I love the texture and it tastes pretty bland, so you can just add some herbal salt and pepper to make it pretty tasty
if you’re like me you’d probably want to break your keyboard in half and shove it down your throat until you can’t see it anymore
Are you okay?
Edit: It’s fine if the answer is “no”.
No
The only useful thing I’ve found for cottage cheese is pranking people.
Incidentally, if you rember the old plastic clad iMacs and powermacs from the late 90’s (with the clearish white plastic and “fun” color accents?)
Those power Mac’s incidentally had a space just above the PSU perfect for keeping a cottage cheese at the right temperature for getting foul.
Foul enough to clear out a computer lab for a week. (It was a boring class, anyway. I’m not sure they ever found the tub…)
we’d use it as poor man’s ricotta back in the day when we were making manicotti. I’m not sure about the price differential, but nowadays it’s easy enough to find ricotta and I’m not that poor.
Really? I’ve heard about rabbit starvation. Wouldn’t cottage cheese be lean enough to suffer the same? Or is there more to it than that (e.g. type of protein, lipids, etc.)?
rabbit starvation
FYI: For those that have never heard of the term:
Protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) is an acute form of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in fat and carbohydrates, where almost all bioavailable calories come from the protein in lean meat
Small tangent - I know this is going to probably be an internet fight, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate for human health.
Bioavailable nutrition is in the fat in the meat, and in the organ meat such as liver.
The Eskimos never died from a lack of carbohydrates.
The text says deficient in fat and carbohydrates. I’m pretty sure they mean it only happens when you don’t have enough of either, not that carbs are an essential nutrient.
You would not be getting enough bioavailable nutrients, but one month is not long enough for that to be a serious problem.
This is not a healthy balanced diet, you could not live on it forever because of bioavailable nutrients and the like. But as emergency food, it’s fine.
If you did not have excess fat at the start of this diet, you would have trouble. There is not enough fat here to keep you going.
750 cals per day, assuming you need about 2500 cal a day, your deficit is about 2000kcals a day. 7700 cals per kg of fat. You would lose about 7.7kg of fat… If you maintain your original metabolic rate, but the body is adaptable, and it would reduce your metabolic rate while you went through this emergency diet
Ah, okay. What do you think might happen due to the comparative lack of carbohydrates? I don’t imagine you could enter ketosis on this diet. Not enough fat. Would the body burn more muscle tissue in spite of the high protein intake?
Ketosis is a metabolic state. It is the process by which your body converts fat into energy. Anytime you lose weight you have been in ketosis… Every night when you sleep your body goes into ketosis.
What people commonly refer to as a ketogenic diet, is just a shorthand way of saying, eating food that maintains your fat burning preference.
So this yogurt diet, will absolutely put you in ketosis, for no other reason than you’re at a caloric deficit per day.
I am not aware of any reason your body would cannibalize your muscles when you have sufficient protein. People often do month-long fasts, as long as they maintain their metabolic rate/activites, they don’t lose significant muscle mass. But this is a function of your stored energy, so if you don’t have enough fat to make up for your metabolic deficit, that energy will have to come from somewhere as a priority to keep your brain alive. Don’t put your body in that position. The science around fasting, is highly contentious, so you’re going to get wildly different viewpoints on this.
But this is a function of your stored energy, so if you don’t have enough fat to make up for your metabolic deficit, that energy will have to come from somewhere as a priority to keep your brain alive. Don’t put your body in that position.
So what you’re saying is I should keep excess body fat, just in case I need to eat only cottage cheese for a month?
The vast majority of people are already prepared for the cottage cheese challenge!
I think the absolute minimum body fat percentage people should have is about 5%men 10%women give or take. Probably much higher. For for 50 kg person, that works out to about 7 kg of body fat minimum.
However, if you want to be drought and famine resistant, you need to get those numbers up!
Oh okay, thank you for the clarification. I wasn’t aware of that. So I guess while you’re sleeping, as long as you haven’t eaten recently before falling asleep, then you’ll enter ketosis, right?
Ignoring glucogen reserves in muscles, the body doesn’t really have a way to store glucose, which is the energy you get from eating carbohydrates.
So all of the glucose except for like 5 g in the blood, get stored as fat. You burn through that 5 g in your blood depending on your metabolic rate and activities in a few hours. This is why a lot of people who are eating carb heavy diets get hungry every few hours, The hangry advertising campaign. They’re just running out of glucose.
Anyway, unless you’re waking up every few hours at night to snack, your body has to enter ketosis to provide energy while you sleep.
The liver does have the ability to make glucose from fat, called gluconeogenesis, but it would still be burning fat to do that.
You’d become severely deficient in key nutrients
Weight loss. I don’t like cottage cheese but I do something similar with greek yogurt, eggs, and chicken breast. High protein is easy weight loss for me. Always listen to your body.
And if your doing a high protein diet make sure to watch your kidney function, make sure your doc does a kidney panel with every physical. I did low carb high protein for several months and my kidney numbers went from good to, not terrible, but not good either.
I have done something like this. You will feel like hell and depending how vitamin deficient you are you could end up in the hospital. When I did it I just bounced back within a few months so it was not worth it.
If you are trying to lose weight counting calories over a long period helped me lose about 50lbs. Just try to stay in weight loss range and exercise for 30 min a day to burn some calories
Nah, I’m more looking for a way to eat cheap for a month (maybe two) while still getting enough protein that I don’t start wasting. Food is expensive, and dairy here is also expensive, but a months worth of cottage cheese is cheaper than a months worth of any meat. I’ll see if I can move some things around in my budget to get a more wholesome diet, though.
Dried beans. Their cheap AF. Nutritious AF. I make up a pot of soup every couple of days. Soak you beans the night before. Boil next day.
Start a new pot off with butter. Sauteed up onion, carrot, and/or celery(all cheap AF, all optional). Add In meat if you like. Sear outsides but don’t worry about cooking all the way through. Add chicken stock (or water) and boiled beans. Simmer covered 30 min-ish. Add in frozen spinach, cook another 5. Salt and season to taste.
Congrats! You just made a pot of bomb ass soup. For like 3$! You can eat for days off that pot. Delicious AND nutritious. Your gut likes variety, give it to it.
Try potatoes. They’re ridiculously cheap (where I am) and loaded with nutrients.
That’s actually where I draw the line, unfortunately. Potatoes are cheap here as well but everything about them makes me feel sick to my stomach. I might start baking bread though. If I were to make my own cottage cheese it should be cheaper than storebought and I could use the whey in place of water for added protein in the bread.
Lentils, rice, and beans together can form a very inexpensive but nutrient rich base for a lot of meals.
I have pretty much taken to making my own stuff to save money and bread is way easier than you think if you are ok with it not being super special but with some money saved they can get a little more fun. I just recently did little buns with mustard and onion powder that was way better than burger buns from the store for way cheaper.
Literally yeast water salt and flour is enough to make pizza dough. If you have a jar of active dry yeast it will last forever it feels and if you just put some in a new jar with some water and flour you can just keep it growing forever and literally not bother buying more. Then sauce and cheese and throw it on a pan you had preheating in the oven.
And milk that’s starting to sour you should absolutely try to make into a quick cheese or something cause it’s likely not bad just chemically changing. Just a little vinegar and you can make cheese or if you are baking use it instead of water and the sour flavor actually helps them taste better.
Chive pancakes can also be made cheap and be a nice thing to make a lot of freeze and use as a filling snack/side.
- Milk and potatoes can give a good base of vitamins and minerals.
- Potatoes are pretty cheap and very easy to grow if you have the time and will to try it. Just toss a few potato halves into a bin of dirt, water periodically and you’ll have more potatoes than you know what to do with
- Toast can be a fairly cheap breakfast, although not very filling. It’s easy to quickly eat as you run out the door too
- I’ve found making sure your dinners have multiple dishes actually makes the food go further and helps in saving money on groceries overall compared to not
- A bag of freezer veggies can keep in the fridge for almost a week pretty easily, and it’s very easy to pour a bit out, nuke it in the microwave for 30-60 seconds and help round out your meal.
- Hotdogs cook very well with ramen noodles (you can also sprinkle in some frozen corn too!), and that can make 2-3 meals for a single person
- if you’re in the states, Aldi is genuinely a really good option to save money on groceries, plus their store brand stuff usually has less sugar than name brand
- white rice is usually dirt cheap and a good base source of nutrients
I will add in that adding some cheap meat and some cheap veggies of any kind to stretch a meal absolutely makes it way more filling and can let you get second and 3rd meals from it.
Also potatoes are insane. I tossed a few under a bush during the winter and just realized I see their sprouts coming out from underneath it in several spots. And a single potato I tried to purposefully grow is wildly outperforming the basil I’m trying to grow. A bowl and some straw could probably grow these things with a little water and fertilizer.
Some neighbors did an experiment one year where they got a 3lb bag of potatoes, cut them all in half then tossed half of them into a garbage bin full of dirt and ate the other half, placed said bin of dirt and potatoes at thw side of the house and periodically watered it. They ended up with more potatoes than they knew what to do with and declared “never again”
Edit: just realized I half described that story already. I’ll just add they had moved to the area from Idaho not long before trying this
Unfortunately, "cheap meat’ is an oxymoron in my country. “Cheap veggies” almost is as well, but it’s getting a bit better on that front (shoutout to Odd Bunch; I wish you’d expand west). I’ll see what I can do about incorporating tatties into my diet since multiple people have recommended them. I’m aware that they’re cheap, but they generally make me feel sick to my stomach. Happen to have some good tips on how I might “hide” them in meals?
You can use them to make bread actually. And thicken a soup. Some of my favorite ways to hide them. And that should help disperse whatever is happening with them.
I think you might have a gastro issue with them. Potatoes are so high in basically everything that they can upset your stomach, and it not be a grease thing. Unless you are getting really grean skinned potatoes full of solanine you might actually be best using them sparingly.
You could look into yams. Sweeter but usually still cheap and pretty darn healthy. I would also say grow peas or green beans. They sprout in days and will harvest for month/s.
Unfortunately if you struggle with potatoes you might also struggle with eggplant that also tends to be cheap.
If you have zucchini I love to just cut them in half and scoop out some of the inside center and mix that with breadcrumbs and sauce and some cheese put it back in the zucchini boat and bake them. They store well and are pretty filling.
I get food insecurity. I once had to feed my whole family on the budget of just my paper route because of a drunk Mom. It’s not fun. But if you let me know what is cheap around you maybe we can figure out something if you want.
Oh no, it’s not a gastro thing. I can tell you that for certain. The taste and texture makes my stomach do somersaults. Normally you see that type of thing when you’ve eaten something and became sick recently after (my neuro prof back in the day had a funny anecdote about whiskey and his inability to drink it after a particularly rowdy night) so I’m wondering if that’s what’s happening. Or maybe I just really can’t stand potatoes.
I’ve never heard of potato bread before! I’ll give it a go. As for eggplant, I’m not the biggest on it and it’s actually a bit expensive here. But zucchini? A m a z i n g. Got some growing right now. Unfortunately that doesn’t help me for a wee while, so I might pick a couple up if I have the money. I like to eat em chopped up with a Greek dressing. Can also shred em and put em in baking (chocolate zucchini muffin :> ) but I can’t quite afford anything so extravagant right now.
As for what’s cheap - basically nothing, lately. I really should move to somewhere that doesn’t have an oligarchical food industry, but that’s a long term thing. Either way, I do appreciate the offer but I’m not sure I’m comfortable accepting. It’s endlessly kind, but I feel I should try to work with what I have before I take from someone else.
Ugh, I wish I was in the States. Aldi won’t come to Canada due to “price fixing” and “manipulative” grocers. Who are, unsurprisingly, a large contributor to my inability to afford nutritious food.
Don’t forget to check food pantries. Many nonprofit foodbanks don’t gate based on income, particularly those operated by churches. It’s often stuff that’s close to expiration, or very cheap brands that you might not want to eat, but it’s better than literally only eating cream cheese and will give you more variety of calories and nutrients to work with
It’s a scientific fact that you are what you eat. So following that logic, you would become a cottage cheese slime.
Can’t wait for chubbyemu to explain what happens to OP.
some brain damage: malnutrition tends to aggravate or cause brain damage.
I’m a brain damage survivor: it sucks, it takes decades to undo ( neuroplasticity takes time to do rewiring ), and life is never going to be what it could have been.
Don’t damage people’s brains.
'tis a good rule, eh?
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Scurvy?
Cottage cheese is not a significant source of vitamin C, and scurvy symptoms begin to appear between 1-3 months of vitamin C deficiency.
