Using a Home Delivery Service: is it Really Cost Effective?

In today’s world of higher prices, it is hard to get the nutrients you need without spending a large amount of your paycheck. If you need to get healthy, there are not many options. Imagine that you had two choices, considering McDonalds and Burger King does not offer that much in the health food department. You could prepare your own meals with grocery store bought food or you could try one of the new diet system by ordering NutriSystem or Jenny Craig meals. Which one is more cost effective?

NutriSystem offers their main meal package for $299.95 a month with free shipping if you get it delivered every month, considering you cannot get completely healthy in under a month. This includes twenty-eight days of breakfast, lunch, dinners, and desserts, which comes down to approximately $3.57 per meal. All this information was taken from nutrisystem.com.

Jenny Craig offers a per meal price and you get to choose your own foods. Most breakfast foods are $1.89 to $3.99, lunch is $3.99 to $5.19, and dinner ranges from $5.29 to $6.29. All this information was obtained at jennycraig.com

For comparison, we’ll take a one week’s worth of meals, which is approximately $75 dollars in NutriSystem meals and $79 dollars at Jenny Craig’s cheapest. For breakfast, they offer a variety of granola bars or oatmeal. The prices at Giant grocery stores are $2.50 for a box of granola and $3.00 for instant oatmeal.

For lunch, mainly there are different kinds of soup, but you can also have sandwiches. Most soup costs around $1.00 per can for Campbell’s, but if you want something heartier, the price rises to $2.00 per can. If you’d prefer a salad, the already bagged lettuce costs $3.00 per bag and tomatoes are $3.99 per pound. Bread costs, at cheapest, $1.19, while lunchmeat ranges from $2.99-$5.99 per pound depending on the type of lunchmeat you want.

For dinner, it ranges from chicken and beef stew to vegetable fajitas. Zucchini is $2.99 per pound, onions are $2.99 per pound, and peppers are $1.99 per pound. Chicken costs $2.80 per pound while ground meat is only $1.20. A box of spaghetti is $.60 and the jar of sauce to go with it is $2.00.

For snacks, it is approximately $.60 for a cup of yogurt, and $3.99 for a bag of apples. Although you are welcome to choose different snacks, these were some suggested on the Jenny Craig website.

Some things you cannot just buy alone, so we’ll assume one box of granola and one box of oatmeal per week. We’ll also assume that two pounds of chicken was used two times, ground meat was used twice, spaghetti was used twice, and vegetable fajitas were used once this week. We’ll have soup and salad four days this week and sandwiches the other two. This makes this week’s meals at $66.02

As you can see, it is considerably cheaper to just buy your own food and prepare it yourself. Although Jenny Craig and NutriSystem do offer convenient home delivery, they also add towards your monthly bill. Also, you would have to go grocery shopping anyways for the things they will not deliver, like paper products and drinks.

Although it may be tempting to buy all the wrong items, if you find healthy recipes you should be able to get in better shape in a few weeks. Although no diet is anything without exercise, you should be able to feel better on the inside as well as look good on the outside.

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