A new year can be a good time to take stock of some areas of your life where there is room for improvement and start taking action to make changes for the better. Whether you have a proper resolution or target, or would simply like to end 2018 having made some positive differences, two common themes people tend to focus on are health and money.
Of course, it can feel like you have to choose between the two – after all, eating healthy fresh foods is more expensive and most effective forms of exercise require club or gym memberships or costly gear, right?
Not necessarily. Here are three ways you can save money while also adopting a healthier lifestyle!
Learn Some Cheap, Nutritious Recipes
You can make some great food with less expensive ingredients if you take the right approaches to cooking. For instance, cheaper cuts of meat may not be great for fast meals but can be as tender and delicious as more expensive cuts when prepared in a slow cooker. Frozen or canned vegetables might not be great as a side on their own like fresh ones, but they can be a cheap and nutritious way to bulk out curries, chilies, stews and other dishes with sauces. Check out Pocket Change Gourmet for some great recipes and tips.
Grow Your Own Food
If you want to eat more fresh vegetables or add flavor to healthy dishes with aromatic herbs, growing your own makes this basically free. Some plants can be grown inexpensively from seeds, but there are others you can grow using cuttings from something you already have, like a piece of ginger root. You would be surprised, too, how many edible things you can grow indoors or in a window box, so even if you don’t have a garden space, you can try this.
There are lots of helpful tips for setting up an indoor home garden online, or, if you have the outdoor space, you can make building your own mini-farm a fun family project!
Free Exercise
While some great forms of exercise like cycling and running are technically free to do, if you don’t already have a bike or proper running shoes (which are absolutely essential if you want to avoid injury), they still carry a cost. However, there is always walking, which is safer to do in normal sneakers rather than specialist ones, and there are also a lot of types of exercise you can do for free at home.
As well as classic things like crunches and push-ups, which are good but not enough on their own to get your body into really good shape, you can search YouTube for free workout videos in all categories, from yoga and Pilates to dance and kickboxing cardio. For best results, try lots of different free workouts to add variety, keep you interested, and work out different muscle groups.
As you can see, it is possible to get better at saving money, and taking care of your body at the same time!