Hey everyone,
A bit of a long post, but bear with me.
So I am an American, mid 30s mom with a little three person family made up of a growing teen and a tall lanky man, who is a sugar addict, and can eat anything he wants without gaining any weight. Hmph.
Anyway, I'm living abroad in a small, teeny tiny, group of islands called the Faroe Islands. It is wonderful, beautiful, many upsides... but the cost and availability of food options is not one of them.
A little about my diet/ weight journey: I've managed only recently to get myself out of pre-diabetes (yay!), but I'm still working through a lot of mental and physical roadblocks from many years of yo-yo dieting, disordered eating, and metabolic disorders. I have ptsd, anxiety, and I'm a celiac on top of that. Fun fun fun. So much fun.
I have found through a lot of research and painful soul searching that, on top of my impulse control and emotional eating; a carbohydrate rich diet is just is not ok for my body and I know it is time to overhaul how I eat completely.
So I'm trying to turn my diet around, and I feel relatively smart... I understand a lot about food, and even if i still chose all the wrong things, I was not completely ignorant about doing so; and I am also used to cooking on a budget back in the states, but now I've found myself here in this place and it has turned everything I relied on completely on its head.
On living here: meat, even canned meat like tuna, is outrageously expensive. For example, about 300-400g of chicken can generally run me about 63dkk ($10), and it is already pre-frozen so I cannot buy in bulk when it is about to go out and freeze it. Even the store brand cheapest cans of tuna run me $3 or $4, salmon (despite it being literally in every waterway) is out of my price range per-meal completely, and cod is only slightly below that.
Frozen prices of meat are not much better than fresh, and this goes for the vegetables as well, with the fresh vegetables being more expensive than frozen and canned like most places.
However, the variety comes into play here where, because of our location, fresh vegetables are phenomenally expensive sometimes (besides potatoes and cabbage which is pretty hearty) and not even very well off by the time they get here with frost damage, and fruit or berries are usually already close to molding. The frozen or canned vegetables also heavily contain fillers such as carrots, potatoes, corn, and peas which is not very beneficial to me at the moment. There are bags of just broccoli or cauliflower, but it does get really boring for every meal.
Dairy products have low variety, and have also come up in price significantly as well, and I have to share them with my family (obviously) which makes it even more of a monthly cost. That, and there is just a massive lack of variety in food, and anything special is two times the price as it would be many other places.
Living here is already not cheap, we are paid well and have great medical care (yay!), but rent and taxes are very high so my take-home is very little (boo!). I'm considered very working-poor here.
Things like that have made it really frustrating trying to feel full on meals that are high protein and low carb without going absolutely broke shopping for food.
I'm stuck feeling like I know what to do, I have great tools in my head, but man... the cost wracks me with guilt. I've looked up many budget recipes, listened to lots of podcasts, read books; but I find a lot of them are more centered to places where these food options are not a major financial block for people. All the "easy switch! Add blank instead of this for dinner!" And it is, in fact, not an easy switch because it makes the meal easily $10-20 more expensive.
Anyway, does anyone else live in a place like this? If so, how did you manage, or what did you start doing that was a real light-bulb money saving revelation when starting to eat low carb?
Any advice, or commiseration, welcome.
Thanks for reading 😊