ITV’s Eat Shop Save challenges volunteers to change their life in just eight weeks. A group of experts helps them overhaul their health, wealth and wellbeing by upgrading their eating, shopping and exercise habits.
I’ve watched all the Eat Shop Save series to see if there are any tips out there I haven’t heard before, and I’ve gathered all their nuggets of wisdom together below to help you in your own goals.
Here’s what I’ve covered below:
- Tips To Eat More Nutritiously
- Tips To Save On Food Spending
- Tips To Get Fitter
- Tips To Clear Debt
Eat Shop Save: the premise
The volunteer’s three goals each week are quite often the same:
- To eat more healthily
- Save money on food shopping
- Be more active
To eat more “healthily” is a bit subjective. For most of the participants it means cooking from scratch for once and giving up takeaways. I think a better aim is to eat more “nutritiously” because people use “healthy” to refer to things like cutting out entire food groups… Except there aren’t many medical professionals that would recommend doing that!
Chef and nutritionist Dale Pinnock supplies the programme’s recipes and nutrition pointers.
Tom Pitfield is Eat Shop Save’s personal trainer.
Kate Hardcastle is their resident retail expert.
Wealth manager and entrepreneur Gemma Godfrey contributes the finance tips.
I’m not a nutritionist or personal trainer etc., so I’ve tried to make it clear which tips come from the Eat Shop Save experts. For anything else I add that might be construed as health advice, I’ll link to someone else qualified because it’s not my intention at all to try and give dietary advice. Do your own research too. Or if you’re a qualified PT etc, feel free to add any other helpful tips to the comments!
I haven’t included how much weight any volunteers lost because this is such an individual thing, and I think the focus should be on overall health gain. Weight is only one possible indicator of health.
The episodes sometimes have slightly different goals like clearing debt, or decluttering when someone feels suffocated by their possessions. It’s also important to remember that achieving these goals can be make or break for some of us. One couple in the second series were likely to split up if they didn’t work together to hit their savings targets and get on the same page when it came to health. I’ve included at the end what happened to some of the Eat Shop Save volunteers in the long term.
Need more ideas to upgrade your wealth and health?
I’ve also recapped these two series if you want to eat and exercise better while spending LESS:
How to Get Fit Fast (For Free)
One thing I found when I was saving for a whopping house deposit as a first-time buyer was that certain goals actually work really well together. I’ve heard people say that it’s more expensive to eat well, or that we can’t focus on saving and have health goals at the same time.
I totally disagree. I think it’s better value for money to eat “healthily”. I don’t think we need to spend a lot to stay active. I plan to show on the blog that we can combine these goals, so join the mailing list if you want to stay in the loop on new posts.
If you’re renting or camping out with family, I hope these tips help you spend better, save more, and feel fitter. Most of us will spend several years saving up for things like a house deposit, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live well while we do!
Tips To Eat More Nutritiously
- Disguise vegetables
- Meal prep
- Swap takeaways for homemade versions
- Make your own snacks
- Diversify the ingredients in classics
- Invest in some kitchen basics
- Eat mindfully
- Pay attention to portion sizes
Here’s how to put these Eat Shop Save tips into action.
Disguise vegetables. One trick to eat more vegetables is to blend them into sauces. Dale added courgette and red pepper to pasta sauce, and sweet potato to homemade curry sauce. These sauces can be frozen for later too. Even if you don’t own a blender, sweet potato mashes very well before mixing into anything.
Meal prep
This is a biggie if you’re going to eat from the Eat Shop Save menu. Batch cook on a day off; one pot meals are easiest like chilli con carne, and spinach and sweet potato curry.
I found one of Dale’s recipes for bean chilli with sweet potato if you’re veggie: Bean Chilli with Sweet Potato
The Spinach and Sweet Potato Curry recipe is on his site.
He also has a one pot creamy chicken stew with no cream (or dairy at all, if you skip the parmesan). Smushing the beans against the bottom of the pan is what makes it creamy instead.
Swap takeaways for homemade versions
It took Dale six minutes to put garlic, tomato puree, black olives, cheese and spinach on top of pitta bread and toast it in the oven…No pizza gets delivered that quick! Takeaway pizza is also mighty calorific in comparison. (Dale has a whole book called Fakeaways all about cooking takeaway alternatives at home).
Here’s his chicken wrap suggestion to replace Doner kebabs.
Dale makes fish and chips at home by coating fish in oat bran and egg instead of batter.
In one food diary Dale analysed for the show, he found 167 ingredients across their meals because of the sheer amount of additives in takeaways (and there weren’t 167 vegetables…) Processed meat can also be high in nitrates which has negative health associations.
Make your own snacks
Dale suggested apples with peanut butter, or flapjack made from dates, peanut butter, oats and mixed seeds. This has no other sugars or butter added, unlike shop-bought flapjack. Because it is more nutrient dense it should be more filling and it won’t give a sugar crash that makes you go back for more.
If you already own a food processor, you can make energy balls from dates, cocoa and nuts. The protein in nuts slows down the release of natural sugars in the dates.
Diversify the ingredients in classics
- Adding red lentils to mince in spaghetti bolognese makes the meat go further
- Bulking out meat with staples like lentils and beans counts as one of our five a day
- Consider wholewheat spaghetti
- Sweet potatoes in bangers and mash will have more fibre than white potatoes according to Dale
(Otherwise they have different nutritional benefits and white potatoes are cheaper, so this doesn’t mean bye-bye to white potatoes forever).
Invest in some kitchen basics
One family in series two ate so much convenience food that they didn’t even own a chopping knife. We don’t all need blenders and food processors and spiralisers to cook more, but we can’t expect to make tasty food regularly without the bare minimum.
When I recapped Save Money Good Food recently, nearly all the recipes never required more than these items:
Baking dish/trays
Frying pan
Chopping board and knife
Saucepans
Large bowls for mixing (or use a spare saucepan)
Tupperware for leftovers
Let me know in the comments if you think you’ve found the best value of any of these items and where!
Eat mindfully
Picking at food while you make it still counts as food eaten! One volunteer Sonal didn’t know how many pakoras she’d have with a meal because she was eating them while frying them and then putting more on the plate at the end. That could end up being several dinners in one.
Pay attention to portion sizes
Portion control applies to sides. If it’s a “side” that doesn’t fit on the plate, then by definition there’s probably more food (fuel) on the table then really needed. Sonal (in the above tip) and her partner would have five or six chapatis on the side of a curry. This completely whacks the portions out of control. Dale suggested they switch to brown rice for the main anyway, and have garlic kale instead of chapatis and pakoras.
Add any tips in the comments. Are you a nutritionist or similar? If not, where do you go for health information? How do you combine wealth and health goals?
Tips To Save On Food Spending
- Make a meal planner
- Shop with a list
- Shop high and low
- Compare loose and multipack veg
- Buy fish frozen
- Skip free from foods unless you have a diagnosis
- Track all your food spending
- Switch brands
- Quit energy drinks
- Buy in bulk
- Ignore best before dates
- Fill your freezer
- Swap ready meals for batch cooking
Put a meal planner on the wall. If something’s not on the meal planner, you probably won’t have time to eat it, so don’t buy anything extra.
Make a list! We know we should, but we don’t. Make one now before your next shop. This blog post will still be here when you come back. Join the mailing list for a reminder of what’s new on the blog in case you get sidetracked.
Shop high and low. Anything at waist height is easy to grab and will usually be more expensive, so check the other shelves.
Check if loose veg is cheaper than buying a multipack. I think it’s usually cheaper frozen and I’ve put the lowest prices per weight for various foods on this page: 100+ Best Value Food Ingredients
Buy frozen fish. This is cheaper than fresh, (and technically fresher anyway because of the time between catching the fish and it arriving in the supermarket). Kate said the small print on the label on fresh fish says “may have been previously frozen” anyway!
We shouldn’t need to buy more expensive free from foods unless you’ve been diagnosed with an allergy or intolerance. See a doctor if you’re unsure.
Track ALL your food spending
Track all your food spending, not just main supermarket shops. Add in any top up shopping, and any food bought during work.
Most of us underestimate our overall spend. If you buy lunch for £6 per day, that would add up to £20000 over 15 years.
One couple in series three were spending £81 per week on the go on top of meals at home. Like most of us, they underestimated how much they were spending. That would add up to £40000 over the next 10 years if they carried on spending that way. It also added up to over 10000 additional calories to the rest of their eating.
Switch brands
Many of us know we could save by shifting to an own brand. If we’re worried about taste, I’ve made a page of taste tests here from other shows. I will continue to update it over time and let subscribers know whenever the page grows. So far it demonstrates that testers either prefer the own brand, or can’t tell the difference between budget and premium versions when the brand name is hidden.
In one episode of Eat Shop Save, switching from Cathedral City cheese to Lidl own brand saved 50%. Apply to that to an entire shop if you usually only buy big brands and you’ll get a nice (reduced) surprise at the till.
Hold your own taste test at home (don’t peek at which sample is which!) and see if you can tell which brand is more expensive. If not, switch!
Quit energy drinks
Not a food tip per se, but the money gets spent in the same place!
One dude on the show drank several a day which totted up to £1800 a year or 13250 sugar cubes.
Kate got him to ask this question every time he fancied an energy drink: “Do I want one sugar cube, or 13250?” The answer was to choose the lower sugar option! Obviously there are plenty of sugar free drinks too…like uh, water?
You could also ask “Do I want this drink, or £1800?” if you know that it’s never going to just be one pricey drink. I reckon the same mindset can be applied if one alcoholic drink tends to turn into two-tequila-floor…
Buy in bulk
Buy ingredients in bulk when it pays off. It is not always automatically cheaper per weight to buy in bulk i.e. I found 500g of red lentils in Lidl cheaper than trying to buy bigger bags anywhere else.
My local Sainsbury’s sells 1kg of spaghetti for 40p (under the “Hubbards” brand) which makes their 3kg bag of pasta actually more expensive by weight in comparison. If you can’t be faffed to spend too long comparing prices, use my 100+ Best Value Food Ingredients list. It will be cheapest the majority of the time.
Don’t automatically throw food past its best before. BBE dates are a guide to freshness, but many foods retain their quality past this date. If it still smells, looks and feels fine, then it’s nom nom nom.
The more you use freezer space to preserve fresh or frozen ingredients rather than ready made convenience foods, the lower your food bill should be.
If you can buy it as a ready meal, then you can probably batch cook it into cheaper yourself (and skip most of the added salt and sugar). Dale’s Tuna Pasta Bake includes his hidden vegetables sauce.
Tips to Get Fitter
- Set a more specific goal
- Take advantage of fitness trackers
- Think outside the box
- Have a competition at home
- Swap tea breaks for HIIT
- Invest in a trampoline
- Or use furniture to your advantage
- Multitask
- Use a points system
- Aim for quality over quantity
Set a more specific goal. Tom suggested the first show’s volunteer Lorraine aim for a 5k Park Run at the end of the 8 weeks. The average UK adult wastes £150 per year on unused sport equipment. Lorraine already owned a neglected treadmill, but needed a specific target to work toward.
Take advantage of fitness trackers. If you already own one, see if you can’t compete with someone else to see who can do more steps.
Think outside the box. One family liked swimming, so they joined a local swim group to go open water swimming and make their fitness more fun. I’d rather attempt a swim in my bathtub, but I’m glad they enjoyed it. Perhaps I just watched Jaws too many times as a child?
Home workouts
Have a competition at home. Whoever you live with, see who can do the most lunges, squats and planks in 20 minutes.
If you usually tend more towards Netflix and sit rather than Netflix and HIIT, try this page I created:
Swap a tea break for HIIT. Tom reckoned 15 minutes of HIIT a day is enough to make a difference and can burn more than 30 minutes on a treadmill. Fill the 15 minutes with squats, pushups and planks. These can be done almost anywhere. 15 minutes is easy to find because in the same amount of time most of us manage to make a cup of tea and check our phone instead.
Even trampolining can be done at home. What have you spent on unused gym membership? Is it more than a one-off item like this? Weigh up (no pun intended) whether you’d be more likely to exercise if you don’t need to leave the house and there’s a one-off cost. At least you can sell on unused home exercise equipment, but you can’t list a gym membership on Ebay… Like Lorraine’s unused treadmill above, attach a target to the item to make it more likely that you will actually use it when you exercise.
Or use furniture to your advantage. Standing up from sitting repeatedly without using your hands will improve muscle mass. Add weights to this exercise as you get stronger.
In one episode, Dan wasn’t doing any exercise because he wasn’t overweight. He suspected though that his inactivity was still a problem and wanted to be more active. Fitness tests showed he was indeed lacking muscle mass, and this will only get worse as he ages. Strength is an important component of health.
This is the kind of use of furniture that’s least likely to lead to an injury. If you’re going to use doorframes to do pullups or chairs for balance etc, then it’s at your own risk!
Multitask if you struggle to fit in exercise. Wall squats while cleaning your teeth should add up to at least 28 minutes of this strength builder a week. Do as many mountain climbers as you can while waiting for dinner to be ready.
Combine the above with a points system to clock up exercise daily:
- 5 points for doing 10 push ups when you wake up
- 10 points for running up or downstairs
- 10 points for 20 seconds of the mountain climbers.
At first try and score 40 points per day then 50, then 60.
Aim for quality over quantity
If you’re unhappy with your regular exercise, up the quality of your workout rather than ticking off time spent.
In series three, Hilary was going to the gym five times a week, but was demotivated because she felt out of shape regardless. The results of the fitness tests done for the show disappointed her.
That’s because you need to aim for quality over quantity with exercise. Tom says it’s common for some people to be regular gymgoers and feel that they’re not getting the benefit.
Do three things:
- Monitor progress
- Focus on efficiency with short and effective workouts
- Fitness is 70% food and 30% exercise. Don’t eat to work out…
Tips to Clear Debt
These are also useful tips if we’re impulse buyers, want some quick cash, or need better ways to manage our cards and cash.
- Create our own popup shop
- Sell what we don’t need
- Pay off debt by highest interest rate first
- Use cash budgeting
Create our own popup shop
Find your problem spending area and put all those belongings in one place, so that you can see you don’t need more. This is the same technique used on Shop Well For Less (probably because it works!) That show curates a popup shop in the volunteer’s houses from their own possessions to demonstrate that they’ve got a shop’s worth of goods already.
This tip can also help anyone declutter and is aimed at anyone who’s debt has arisen from overspending on anything outside of rent, bills, and food. I’ve been addicted to buying clothes before (without getting into debt, but I was at risk). I totally understand therefore the constant need to shop for what are really non-essentials.
Gemma got the family in episode two of the first series of Eat Shop Save to use this tip. They were in debt, but thought they also might have a hoarding problem.
After tracking their spending, they could see they were spending £40 monthly on new clothes. Gemma created a pop up shop of the clothing they already owned. They realised there was plenty of it, and most of it still had tags on, so there was no need to keep buying.
Sell what we don’t need
The same family made £76 at a car boot sale of their unwanted items. Car boot season should be in full swing as I write this, but thanks to coronavirus, we just have to sell online instead.
If there are items that won’t ever get worn again but which have sentimental value, consider taking a photo as a memento instead. This family had held onto their child’s fancy dress costumes, for example, although they were outgrown.
Leave a comment if you have any tips about selling online.
Pay off debt by highest interest rate first
Pay off debt by the highest interest rate first regardless of the balance. A small amount with a high interest rate that is allowed to rollover will cost you more in the long term if it’s not prioritised than a large debt with a low interest rate.
Use cash budgeting
If you can’t resist credit cards, put your cash budget for your weekly categories in jars. When the jar runs out, you can’t spend on that category anymore. (There are other variants of this system like using envelopes, and then you take the relevant envelope out the house with
you).
With the jar system I suppose you might put the cash in your wallet and then forget to put unspent money back in the jar and lose track of what the money was reserved for.
I’ve written more about different ways to budget including cash versus card in these two posts:
Cherry Healey’s Property Virgins
The latter post is an epic on both saving money and buying houses.
Eat Shop Save: The Results
So what was the outcome of the above for the Eat Shop Save volunteers?
Series One
In episode one, Lorraine ran a 5k after eight weeks training and saved £40 in a single grocery shop. In series three, Lorraine had continued with the changes over the past two years. She said she didn’t find sticking to her goals hard because it became her lifestyle rather than an experiment.
Episode two’s family saved £800 to pay off debt by using a meal planner, quitting takeaways, batch cooking and selling at a car boot.
In episode three, the couple saved £160 IN ONE WEEK on food by making their own work lunches, only buying the ingredients on their meal planner and switching to the discount aisle/own brand. They saved £1000 over eight weeks.
Episode four’s volunteers saved £600 after eight weeks by sticking to shopping lists, reducing their supersized meals, and tracking their spending weekly. This was enough to pay the legal fees towards their first home purchase.
Guess what? I have a blog post on funding that too:
How To Choose A Conveyancer Or Solicitor You Don’t Hate
Series Two
The first family saved £600 in eight weeks by quitting takeaways and taking dinner leftovers to work the next day for lunch. When they checked in during series three, they had kept their weekly food spend down to £40 per week in the year since.
The gent in the second episode saved £300 by quitting energy drinks.
Becky in episode three saved £650 by cooking from scratch and avoiding expensive gluten free processed foods. She discovered she wasn’t gluten intolerant and didn’t need to buy specialist foods, but her symptoms also went away when she began eating food she had prepared herself.
When they caught up with her in series three, Becky had stuck with her new lifestyle after filming. Ultimately she dropped eight clothes sizes and kept her grocery bill to one weekly shop of £30-45.
Episode four’s family added so many vegetables to their meals that they started growing their own! They replaced 100% of their ready meals with batch cooking and saved £100 per week.
Series Three
The first family cut their weekly grocery spend by 50% and saved £1000 over eight weeks. They were eating 16kg of chocolate usually over the same time period, or 93000 calories. Going cold turkey on chocolate alone would save them £1440 a year.
In episode two, the family saved £1500 towards clearing debts.
In episode three, Vik and Sonal cut their grocery spending by one third by reducing their overeating and saved £500. They would save £3000 a year if they continued at the same rate. Vik also got his visceral fat into a healthy range according to tests; this had been an important goal for him after a recent bereavement.
In the final episode, they had £3700 spare after eight weeks because they sold a car for £2500 and saved £1000 just on food. The car had been buried under clutter because they thought they didn’t have time to sort it out.
Kate gave them 30 minutes to clear out the garage if they really wanted to sell the car. Whaddyaknow? 30 minutes was all they needed. If you’re putting off something because it seems too big, start with the smallest action. You’ll likely find it’s not such a big task after all.
(I mentioned my recap of Cherry Healey’s Property Virigns above regards budgeting, but that post also features a debate about selling cars for a big cash injection).
Eat Shop Save: What Will You Do?
If we want to eat more nutritiously we can…
- Disguise vegetables
- Meal prep
- Swap takeaways for homemade versions
- Make your own snacks
- Diversify the ingredients in classics
- Invest in some kitchen basics
- Eat mindfully
- Pay attention to portion sizes
To save on food spending we can…
- Make a meal planner
- Shop with a list
- Shop high and low
- Compare loose and multipack veg
- Buy fish frozen
- Skip free from foods unless you have a diagnosis
- Track all your food spending
- Switch brands
- Quit energy drinks
- Buy in bulk
- Ignore best before dates
- Fill your freezer
- Swap ready meals for batch cooking
If we need to get fitter we can..
- Set a more specific goal
- Take advantage of fitness trackers
- Think outside the box
- Have a competition at home
- Swap tea breaks for HIIT
- Invest in a trampoline
- Or use furniture to your advantage
- Multitask
- Use a points system
- Aim for quality over quantity
To clear debt or save more we can:
- Create our own popup shop to evaluate our belongings
- Sell what we don’t need
- Pay off debt by highest interest rate first
- Use cash budgeting
So what do you think? Would you use any of the tips from the show, or are you doing any of these things already? How much could you save if you changed any of your current eating and exercise habits? Let me know in the comments!
I’m interested to hear from anyone who’s read the Eat Shop Save book that accompanies the show too and whether you found it helpful.
The above covers the first three series up to and including Eat Shop Save 2019. If there’s more series, I’ll update this post. (If they planned a series for 2020, I wonder if coronavirus has got in the way…Although I think the experts could still help remotely, and good health and financial stability are more important than ever for lots of us).
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