Eating healthy, cheap, easy is easy if you put even 4 hours of thought into it and are willing to learn. I'm in Toronto Canada, so these might not be tailored to you, but you can get the general idea.

1. Eat things in season. Squash, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, corn are just unbelievably cheap in the autumn. Use garlic, onion, bay leaf, oil, a couple thai chili peppers fry them in the bottom of a pot with some coconut oil. Put the cubed squash (skins and all!) in the pot with a lid and some stock (veggie or chicken) until soft. Smush down add other veggies and add a half can of coconut milk and you have 8 or 10 meals at around a $1 CAD per meal. Easy to heat up, bring to work, lasts a while in the fridge.

2. Eat better, cheaper animal protein. Mussels are very cheap and very delicious. Canned clams are easy too. Sardines on toast are easy and delicious. Eggs. If you're adventurous get the butcher to grind beef heart with chuck and make much healthier beef heart burgers.

3. Figure out the cost of things per calorie, but be careful to restrict what you buy to just within the set of healthy foods. For example, whole milk is pretty cheap per calorie and still pretty healthy if you're of European ancestry. Nuts look completely overpriced until you realize that they are 1/5th the cost per calorie of carrots. I know it seems counter intuitive to try to find calorie rich foods, but if you're poor you do need to pay attention to this. Avocados, olive oil, granola, almond butter.

4. If it is dry, canned, or otherwise keeps, buy in bulk. Brown rice, steel cut oats, flour, cans of tomatoes, bags of onions, carrots, everything.

5. Slow cookers make things easy, pressure cookers make things fast. I own one that does both and if you want fast, healthy, cheap, delicious: one chicken leg, some stock, veggies, some dry spices + pressure cooker = perfect meal in 10 mins with very little cleanup.

I bet I could eat an entire box of hamburger helper. I know I could eat three cheezeburgers at a sitting. Once in a rare while I indulge in junk food like that. But beef tenderloin costing maybe $25/lb naturally tends to take care of the whole "technically you only need 2 oz protein per day" or whatever it is exactly.

Yes Chinese restaurants are famous for using interesting (gross) parts of the chicken to increase profits, but for how little chicken I use in a family sized stir fry I can afford a clean probably not salmonella infected boneless skinless organic chicken breast.

I mean, sure, for $10 I could eat hot dogs until I puke and/or gain two pounds of fat, but I'd rather eat a nice small grilled steak.

As a rough guess the more you use your grill and wok and the less you use your oven, toaster, and microwave, the healthier you're probably eating. Also a wok looks expensive as an experiment, like a couple meals worth of food, but unless you do something crazy it never wears out and its cheap compared to something like a complete all-clad stainless steel cooktop set. Also if you're trying to learn how to cook, most vegetables will not kill you with food poisoning no matter how hard you try, so some vegetarian stir fries are a delicious place to start.

This a thousand times. My wife and I cook most of our meals at home and whenever someone asks me how to get started I always recommend a good quality (read $20-30) carbon steel wok that will last for decades if cared for properly. The ease/flexibility of cooking in it is amazing and healthy stir fries are close to idiot proof for beginners so long as they follow a couple of simple rules.

EDIT: the other tip I generally give is learn the base of a vinaigrette (one part vinegar to two/three parts oil) and it will absolutely slash the amount of worthless calories and sugar you consume. When trying to eat healthy so many people will prepare a salad (good) but then drench it in store bought salad dressing without reading the label (bad). With the base recipe you can experiment with different vinegars and acids (e.g. lemon juice) plus flavor boosters like garlic and shallots which will produce a super tasty and healthy dressing at a fraction of the cost of buying something at the store.

Then one day, my wife had prepared salad fixings for dinner and I assembled a bowl with lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber, topped with a small handful of peanuts and sesame seeds and a little cheese... not a bad meal, but I needed a little dressing. I enjoy dressing as much as the next guy, but I do try to use as little as possible.

Anyway, the lettuce was pretty wet and I had a flash of insight... I just sprinkled the ranch dressing powder directly on the salad and it worked great. You get the tang and savor, without all the fat and sugar.

One of the things you have to realize is that if you're trying to save money, you don't get to eat what you want to eat all the time.

That's like saying "It's much more expensive to eat fresh produce, my two favorite are foie gras and truffles, and those are fresh, but not cheap."

Most people (in the world) eat a diet of starches and pulses with some spices. Considering how cheap beans, rice, and vegetables are at ethnic markets and farmers's markets, eating healthier is more time consuming, not more expensive than eating crappy food.

Of course, you'll have to give up on the fact that you can have raspberries year round. Raspberries are a seasonal fruit, and in season, they are cheap as heck, are as all produce.

I've found that, to a certain degree, "cheap, healthy, tasty, fast -- pick at most three" seems to (often) be the situation I find myself in.

Well, that's sort of to be expected. :-( All the foods you've mentioned are highly processed, and engineered to be shelf-stable, tasty, and use cheap, good tasting ingredients. I wouldn't even consider them food anymore, more like highly engineering edible dopamine stimulators.

Opposed to that, a grapefruit does not stand much of a chance. But if you kick processed sugars for a few weeks, things start slowly tasting better, or so I hear. I've been trying to do that, but sugar is in almost everything these days

If it isn't convenient (timely and open at desired times), tasty, and inexpensive it won't compete on the three metrics that the actual competition is winning on.

I'll agree they're abundant, but are they actually cheap? How much money in those products do you have to eat to feel full, vs healthier food?

It's easy to pound down snack foods and desserts but still feel snacky, and that's just flushing money down the toilet while adding to your personal carry-on burden.

Not everything needs to be 24/7 exciting, least of all food. Figure out a few spices and you're good to go. What else is there?

I too lost the same amount of weight and food to me now is just fuel organized in tupperware that I heat up and scoop down in a few minutes. Why? Now when I go out to eat I get to properly think and decide what to spend my money on, it's that much better.

$50/week on food. Veggies, lean meats, rotate a source of carbs.

I can get just as much enjoyment as I did from an unhealthy diet, but at quite a bit more cost.

Lean meats and spices. How is that boring? If I want lobster or steak I'll go out and have it properly done. At that point it's not boring, it's luxury. If you equate "not boring" with luxury then I'm not sure what to tell you.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2014/01/07/the-new-...

(I think steak is easier to cook than chicken)

[0]: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-perfect-steak-in-the-ov...

Only things I've ever had to throw out have been things that come in really large packages, like lettuce (extremely cheap and not the main part of a diet anyway, so it doesn't matter if half of it goes to waste) and other big leafy vegetables that are very cheap, like Kale or other non-essentials.

Most meats come in package sizes well suited for individual consumption:

1. Sirloin Steak = 2 portions

2. Package of turkey/chicken breasts = 2 portions

3. Rotisserie chicken = 2 meals/portions

4. Fish filet (salmon, tilapia, etc.) = various packaging, but easy enough to pick for 1 or 2 portions with no leftovers.

If you're a single person household and you buy a 20lb turkey for yourself...well that's on you for not being able to do basic arithmetic.

Thinking back to my bachelor pad days you are correct for processed stuff like making your own PB&J sandwich from bottled peanut butter and jam and purchased sliced bread. I'd end up throwing out moldy bread and jelly and rancid old peanut butter. Ironically to save money I had to cook healthier, stir fries of frozen veg and deli meat, salads I could eat in a day or two, fruits and veggies, stuff like that.

I could buy a hot dog from a hot dog stand or make my own at seemingly lower expense, but if I made my own hot dog there is no way I could gulp down a whole package of hot dogs and bag of buns at once, and of course the package sizes are different and the LCD is quite large, so I'd toss an opened package of hot dogs after some days of it looking or smelling questionable, or toss moldy hot dog buns, and swear off "cooking".

But boiling a wiener and putting it in a bun is not what most people mean by home cooking, nor assembling a PB and J sandwich.

Generally speaking you can save money by cooking at home, but not by assembling processed components at home. Or at least its much harder. I don't think I can run a net profit off homemade pizza if its made with pre-made store bought crusts.

If you pay a lot more as a single-person household, you have an excellent opportunity for improvement on your hands.

They can develop mold, which sometimes is not noticeable, but will attract booklice. I have had that happen to a bag of rice. There are also rice weevils.

This already makes eating healthy costlier (if, of course, we don't count medical costs from not eating healthy), as this "considerable more time" is an opportunity cost.

Cooking is a rare hobby where the result of the recreation displaces a cost. I've never made anything in my carpentry shop or electronic lab that I couldn't live without or I'd just have to pay someone else to do, those hobbies are 100% financial loss, whereas every meal a hobbyist makes displaces filler material they'd have to have otherwise purchased from someone, and often enough the financial loss of the cooking hobby is negative, or rephrased a net financial gain.

Hobbies, like everything else, have opportunity costs attached, which even applies just between hobbies (e.g. practicing your X more happens to the detriment of Y, your other hobby), but obviously also between hobbies and work or other lifestyle choices.

There are tons of people whose hobbies have run afoul of their work, or family relations, or health, etc, as the effort, time, etc, for doing a hobby could apply to any of those other things.

We have been restricting cost in this discussion to monetary cost, not opportunity cost. Why bring in this separate definition just to muddy the waters, when in the parent comments we're just talking about dollars and cents?

I feel a good rule (I should have said this in my original post) is : "cheap, tasty, healthy, fast" -- pick at most 3.

At the moment I alternate between dumping 'cheap' and 'tasty' most of the time, with the occasional 'fast' when I have the time.

A more useful discussion revolves around time. In order to eat cheap and healthy food you must cook everything yourself! Preferably in larger batches; things like slow cooking a whole chicken in water to not only prepare meat but to make chicken broth as well, then using that meat and broth later in other dishes and soups. All of this takes planning and time.

Buying frozen meals or going to McDonalds is vastly more expensive, dollar wise, than preparing your own food. But they also require zero planning and minimal effort -- those are the real "savings" provided by junk food.