Disclaimer: I am not a registered dietician or doctor, and the advice here is for a wide audience and may not cater to your individual/specific health or dietary needs. If you have specific health requirements/implications, please speak to the appropriate professional.
With many work places shut down and businesses struggling with the pandemic, we may have to put our gainZ on hold until things have stabilised. Surviving and keeping ourselves/others safe is of course the priority, and losing some bodyweight or muscle mass is not the end of the world. We can always get back after it once things are somewhat back to normal.
That being said, there are a few tricks we can utilise to maximise our food shop and diet to remain in a caloric surplus (or caloric requirements in difficult times) without breaking the bank.
Aprons On
Forget the microwave meals or pre-prepared dishes, all we need are a few whole food ingredients, some basic cooking techniques and we’ll be making our money stretch a heck of a lot further. We don’t need fancy or exciting recipes to survive or put on mass, so roll up those sleeves and experiment!
You can get great tasting results from a carbohydrate source (potatoes, pasta, rice, etc), a protein source (chicken, beans, tofu etc), some seasoning and some sauce. There are no rules other than make sure it’s safe to eat before eating it (making sure it’s not gone off and is properly cooked), so if you want to make scrambled eggs with mince and spinach thrown in, go for it. Bacon fajitas? Do it. Pineapple on pizza? …technically it’s OK...
Meal prepping is also a huge time and money saver. All this means is cooking up a big batch of something (maybe a pasta dish or some chicken and rice), and splitting it into a few tupperware boxes that get popped into the fridge - ready to be eaten over the next few days. Different foods will last for different lengths of time before going off, so do some research before assuming the fridge will act as a time machine.
Think in Daily Requirements Instead of Meals
Typically we have a routine of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and with them are breakfast foods, lunch foods and dinner foods - it would be weird to have cereal for dinner, or steak for breakfast, right? Yes, but it’s doable.
Instead of breaking up our main daily intake in terms of breakfast, lunch and dinner, we can think of it in terms of protein, carbs and fats. Both give us the nutrition we need, but the latter option gives us more options to save money. If we think “I need to get 30g of protein in each meal today”, we can use the pack of chicken or beans that were on offer for each meal. Same with carbs, instead of “I need cereal for breakfast, bread for lunch, pasta for dinner”, we can easily just use pasta for all 3. One giant bag of pasta is cheaper than cereal, bread and pasta. As such, this option also takes advantage of multibuy or bulk buying deals - helping us to save more money.
This may not give us much variation, so we’ll need to experiment with cooking styles, sauces, seasoning and condiments to avoid getting bored of the same foods over and over. When prepping for physique competitions I would live off chicken, rice/sweet potatoes and veggies 3x a day for 6-12+ weeks at a time - condiments were my salvation.
A starting point for bulking daily macro requirements is:
Protein: 1.5-2g per kg of bodyweight (eg 135-180g of protein for someone weighing 90kg)
Carbs: 5-8g per kg of bodyweight (eg 350-560g of carbs for someone weighing 70kg)
Fats: 0.5-2g per kg of bodyweight (eg 40-160g of fats for someone weighing 80kg)
Vegetables: 5-6 cups of varied veggies (think colourful - green leafy veg, red bell peppers etc)
These are just a general starting point - to account for individual differences we’ll need to adjust as we go, adding or reducing the amount of carbs/fats if we’re not gaining weight or gaining more fat than we’d like.
Don’t Panic Buy
Protein and veggies are important parts of our diet, and most of us could do with consuming more of each. However, if we go overboard and eat more than we need for the day our body isn’t going to store all the extra goodness for later (like it does with carbs/fats) - some of it will just be taken out with the trash. This, for bulking at least, becomes wasted money and wasted space - if we’re full up on veggies and protein we might not have room for the carbs/fats we need for recovery and growth. A strategy for losing weight, not so good if we’re trying to gain it.
So how much do we need? Everyone will be different and have individual needs, but a general daily starting point is:
Protein: 1.5-2g per kg of bodyweight (eg 135g-180g of protein for someone weighing 90kg)
Veggies: 5-6 cups of varied veggies (think colourful - green leafy veg, red bell peppers etc)
If we’re hitting the upper limits of these, and not gaining weight, we’ll need to eat more carbs/fats - extra protein/veggies won’t do us much good bulking-wise.
Reduce Quality
Not all protein is equal, as some food sources will contain a greater range of amino acids and some will have unwanted extras (particularly highly processed food, which will have all kinds of additives). However, we don’t need the top of the line stuff to get our daily nutrition and gainZ in - so some sacrifices can be made in the short term. This doesn’t mean going straight to the bargain bin 60% meat hot dogs - instead it can be as simple as swapping the chicken breast for chicken thighs, or going from 5% fat mince to 15% fat mince. Often the difference will just be a bit more fat and a bit less pennies.
Carbs are Cheaper than Fats
Carbs and fats provide us with energy and resources for various bodily functions - hormones, brain and joint health, etc. Despite some diets aiming to reduce or cut out either carbs or fats, neither is “better” or “worse” than the other - they’re both useful to the body and overindulgence of anything will be bad for us. However, one thing we can say is that carbs seem to be generally cheaper to buy than fats - think a kilo of pasta, rice, or potatoes vs a kilo of avocados, nuts, fish, or cheese.
For bulking, we need to be taking in more carbs/fats, so once we’ve fulfilled our basic fat needs for the day, our bank account will appreciate it if we look to carbs for the extra bulking fuel. There’s nothing wrong with getting extra fat in, just gotta find what works best for your needs, preferences and the situation.
For fats, a good starting point for daily nutrition is 0.5-2g per kg of bodyweight - a wide range to accomodate people who prefer more fats in a day and those who prefer more carbs. So for someone weighing 80kg, the minimum would be 40g (after which we can pile in the carbs to save money), but the ideal amount for preference will likely be somewhere between 40-160g.