Grocery Shopping and a Week of Meals for Vegan Bodybuilders and the Dogs That Love Them

**UPDATE: How We Saved $7000 Annually on Our Plant Based Grocery Bill **

This post will either be really boring or really informative…Since two major roadblocks to eating less processed food that people cite are the cost and confusion about what to buy, I thought it might be useful to post our grocery lists, the cost, and an overview of what I made with it for the week. Unfortunately, our scanner is broken so I have to type it all out, gah!

We eat enough for a small family: Derek eats between 6,000 and 7,000 calories a day and I eat between 2,200 and 3,500 depending on what workouts I’m doing. I also make food for our two 60-ish pound dogs. Given those facts, I think our average grocery costs of about $200-275 per week is pretty damn reasonable.

I achieve this, in part, by:

• Buying dried instead of canned beans and pressure cooking them
• Bulk bins for things like pumpkin seeds, nuts, beans, oats, etc
• Making most of our soymilk – that alone used to cost $80/month
• Buying very few processed foods overall

Tuesday we shopped at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods for the week.

Trader Joe’s

Whole Foods

Grand Total:   $156.27

We had some staples at home already, like salad dressing, more brown rice, whole wheat pasta, nuts, protein powder, protein bars, and a few bags of sprouted whole wheat bagels. So the actual total for the week is closer to $200.

What I made/will make with all this food:

Soups: fennel, butternut squash, cauliflower, broccoli

Breakfasts: Fruit/protein smoothies, steamed greens and/or carrots and oatmeal, oat groats or sweet brown rice

Lunches: Leftover soup from the night before with most meals and a green salad with every meal, tempeh noodle salad (3 days worth), brown rice and tofu stir fry (leftovers), sweet potato and white bean chili, lentils and brown rice with pine nuts and onions (leftovers), quinoa and tempeh with baby bok choy

Snacks: Sprouted bagels with almond butter, grapefruit, almonds, protein bars. Plus two of Derek’s 1,000 calorie gainer shakes a day.

Dinners: Soup and salad with every meal, Gardein and asparagus – 2 nights, tofu omelets filled with broccoli and sweet onion, cashew cream sauce whole wheat linguine with vegetables, homemade vegan sausauge with fresh tomato sauce and zucchini, tofu, cabbage, and dried shiitake stir fry with brown rice, lentils and brown rice with pine nuts and sweet onions

Dog Food: 4 days worth – whoops, I underestimated. Brown Rice and TVP dog food for Joe, our golden retriever, and Chickpea dog food for Gretchen, our yellow lab mix. Joe-Joe does not like chickpeas and Gretchen is allergic to all grains (she gets ear infections). They also get our vegetable scraps plus their own “dog broccoli”, as we call it, with their dinners. I also buy a supplement for them called VegeDog to make sure they’re getting the right vitamins and minerals. Gretchen has been vegan for about 9 of her 12 years and Joe has been with us a year – with luck he’ll be as healthy as she is at her age.