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Eating healthily is more about spending time than money. It is absolutely possible to eat inexpensive, but nutritious food on a lower budget than the alternative diet. The only sacrifice is convenience, but you'll recoup the extra time spent cooking when you don't have to work so long at the gym to keep your figure.

Here are a few tips to cut your grocery bill, but up it's value:

1. Rediscover starchy vegetables. There was a reason why the Irish (prior to the famine, of course) could live almost exclusively on potatoes. They're not only cheap, but have just about every vitamin and mineral you need, especially with the skins on.

Switching our diet back to potatoes from pasta still gives you the comfort-food you want, but saves money in a couple of ways. Firstly, pound-for-pound they're cheaper. Secondly, if pasta becomes a more intermittent food source, then you can opt for the plain white flour noodles, instead of the more expensive whole-grain.

2. While we're on the subject of old-world staples, there are others that tend to get over-looked. Vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, and squash tend to get passed up for fancier options that our favourite Food Network chefs showcase. But these plain-Jane veggies are just as nutritious, are more often local, and of course, are cheap.

I'm always amazed at how expensive spinach is, but I buy it because I love it. I get many more salads out of the $1.99 bunch though if I mix in some cabbage at $1.19 for the whole head.

3. Buying local and in season increases the nutritional content of your food exponentially. From the minute a food is harvested it starts to decay, meaning the vitamins are breaking down and the carbohydrates are shortening from healthy long-chain starches to insulin-spiking sugar molecules. So the longer your food spends traveling to you, the less good it's doing you.

So start stocking up on the foods that grow near you, and buy them when they're in harvest. This way you can buy them in big quantities and can or freeze them, which preserves the nutrients better than buying them fresh in the off-season.

And by the way, our bodies are built for seasonal feast and famine cycles, so it's OK to gorge on the peaches when they're ripe and then eat mostly root veggies in the winter.

4. Once you've got that down pat, see if you can get even MORE local: grow it, pick it or catch it yourself. This is by far the cheapest way to eat. A $1 pack of zucchini seeds, some water (free if you collect it in a rain barrel), fertilizer

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