So you’re a healthy eating convert, and you want to start making sure all your meals are perfectly balanced. If you’re on a limited budget, though, you might have a problem. There’s a reason why most people get too much carbohydrate and fat and too little protein: most kinds of protein are expensive, especially if you are into meat and cheese. A lot of general consumers only think meat and cheese, are the only two sources of protein. As a vegan, I always advise my clients to eat beans, lentils, mushrooms as a source of protein.

So, if you want to eat healthily on the cheap, what’s the answer? Well, it might surprise you. What you need are beans, lentils or mushrooms.

Beans are a cheap crop, readily available in large tins for not very much money at all, and yet they are an excellent source of protein and taste good too. There’s no shortage of variety, either: you can get everything from baked beans to kidney beans to butter beans, all lined up there in the same section for you. If you’re not sure of what to do with them, find some vegetarian recipes, which tend to be very bean-heavy, and give them a try. 

It can even be nice to mix together a few different kinds of beans and have a bean salad with a sauce – a simple side dish, but an easy way to add protein to your meal. Pasta with a non-dairy-based pasta sauce containing beans is an example of an ideally balanced meal, as long as you don’t overdo it with the pasta, as is rice with bean curry.

You can even have a mixed vegetable stew with lentils. That indeed take less time to cook and nourishes the body with a well-balanced diet.

Of course, I’m not recommending that you stick to beans for your protein all the time, as you’re bound to get sick of them eventually. If you can replace your meat with beans/lentils, you’ll save a lot of money without affecting the balance of your meal.

Check out for my simple recipes for beans…

Photo by Shelley Pauls on Unsplash