To feed my family on £1 per person per day

[Dramatic]

I've heard about celebs doing this and finding it almost impossible but really it's not that hard, I spend £25 a week (or less) on me and 3 kids. Am I a cheapskate or do other people spend this much? I shop at Aldi if that makes a difference. Maybe I'm depriving my kids by spending £1 a day on them. How much do you spend per person per day? Surely it's not that unreasonable to think £1 a day is plenty to feed yourself, why are people making such a fuss about it?

Oh, my lentil soup diet has brown bread (but not wholemeal, note) because it's 2pm cheaper than smart price white bread. And there's plenty of fibre in all that lentil soup.

OP get some vitamin drops.. a bottle of eyeq and work out how to get more calcium into your kids.. they're building bone and aren't getting enough from what you've posted.

You can give them cheese as well. 19mo DS hates milk (i only get it into him disguised in food) but i make sure i do things like, porridge everyday, spinach and cheese omelettes and veggie bakes in a cheese sauce for the vit d and calcium. Milky puddings also work, so baked custards, rice pudding and fruit blancmanges etc

I also give ds vitamin drops too.

No, you wouldn't go through marg that quickly. But you can use the savings to buy washing powder and shampoo and school shoes and other such things. Ditch the tea and sugar too and you can buy some pasta, rice and/or tinned tomatoes to vary your diet of slightly runny lentils.

Lots of people would miss the tea.

330ml is the size of a can of pop. Surely you would use half that on cereal? And drink the other half before bed.

My nephews have :

Breakfast - cereal or toast. If they have toast they have milk to drink. If they have cereal they have chopped apple (half each) and raisons on it.

School dinners which include one bit of fruit
After school - one piece of fruit, followed by a packet of crisps, some biscuits, some nuts.yogurt.

Dinner - pasta dish, or chicken/meat/fish with spuds and veg. Or eggs waffles beans.

Supper - cereal or toast (whatever they didn't have at breakfast)

P.s. They are 5 and 6. At weekends for lunch they will have chunks of cheese, tomatos, peppers, cucumber etc. Or wraps. Honesy they do not stop eating.

Oh come on, you really think my kids are malnourished? plenty of kids refuse to eat fruit and veg at all and are perfectly fine.

My youngest refuses fruit like ever and will only eat veg mashed up.. he gets vitamin drops and eyeq because of it.

A kids diet doesn't always present as a problem when they're still little.. it stores up problems for later on. Seriously, have a rethink and do some tweeks.. you can't skimp on food.. it's the most important thing next to a roof over the head.

I spend about double that on just me and DD (8) and I get everything as cheap as possible, shopping mainly at Lidl plus extras from Tesco. I'm sure I could feed us for £25 if I absolutely had to but we'd be eating a lot of beans on toast and not much fruit. It definitely wouldn't be very healthy.

If that's all you can afford OP then I'm sure it'll have to be fine won't it :)

Op is being treated harshly I think, uncalled for. I think you're doing fab op. I would try and add some fish to your menu though, mackerels are about 1 each and the kids can share one.

Hmm - when mine were younger than 6 we got through 22 (YES OP TWENTY TWO pints of milk a week) and I only have two children.

When they were both under 6 was in about 2003/4 and I reckon I spent about 90 - 100 a week then at the supermarket. Not stinting perhaps and I can see I could have done it for 50-60 if I had had to.

However, when DH spent week after week working abroad the two teenagers and I once lived on £50 for a week because I accepted a Mnet challenge. It was doable - more easily so if I hadn't worked full-time, but it was time consuming and miserable.

All I can say really, is God help you when they are teenagers because what you are spending is probably just about squeakingly doable with infants - it will, I am sorry to say, get harder and harder the bigger they get, the more they grow and the hungier and growier they become.

I actually don't think they are malnourished, I just think it sounds a bit boring and repetitive. And are they going to be happy to eat new foods like fish when they are older? Do the kids ever get to pick out a packet of biscuits or have any involvement in what they eat, particularly for the fussy one it might be an idea to involve them more instead of the same old same old. But I know all this costs money and getting out of debt is important.

Oh god I'm now worrying I'm actually half starving my children. :( it is very repetitive but there are only a certain number of meals that they all like and clearly I can't afford to cook more than one meal a night.

Dramatic

please look into food bank your hv or childrens centre can give referral. With regards to milk we don't even go through 4pints a week DS doesn't drink it, won't eat cereal only time he has it is when I make mashed potato and i rarely drink tea, but he eats yoghurts and lots of cheese which even that ain't cheap these days.

I don't think your dc's diets are too bad. As you say the oldest 2 get additional fruit and milk from nursery. Maybe but some more milk for the little one and for weekends.

I worry about your diet though op!

OP if you are concerned about their nutrition then you could do what i did and work out how many calories you each need a day and then what proportion of that should be from what food group. ie for a 2yo it's between 34-41cals for each pound they weigh. So my DS is 30lbs and needs 1200cals a day. i think 2 weetabix is 120cals + 200mls of milk 125cals. So would be about 20% of his calories and about 2/3s of his calcium.

I'm sure there are kids out there with worse diets! I managed on £25 a week for a few months due to losing a job and being beyond skint and it was repetitive and dull, but we managed because we had no choice. I'm still not exactly flush, but I average about £40 a week now for me and ds(8) but this includes household stuff, toiletries etc. I've just spent £57 at Aldi, but we were running low on stuff like washing powder and tea bags, so it was a bit more this week.

My ds is picky and will only eat a select few pieces of fresh fruit and veg (carrots, cucumber, apples, strawberries, grapes, pears and mushrooms if very tiny!) but he likes tinned mandarin oranges, peaches and pineapple too, and I can get away with puréeing tinned tomatoes with onions, garlic etc to serve with pasta, or as a base for a pitta bread pizza. He also loves raisins, sultanas and dried apricots, so he has these for snacks and on his weetabix. He doesn't drink milk or eat bananas, but he loves a couple of bananas in half a pint of milk whizzed through the blender, and prefers his carrots raw unless cooked in a cottage pie or something. He's a very little eater, and I'm never convinced he's getting enough vitamins so I give him a supplement just to be safe.

I agree with PP's that you need to look at their calcium intake and maybe look at introducing a vitamin supplement alongside what they eat.

I'll definitely speak to the hv although I do feel I would be using a food bank unnecessarily. I will also attempt to work out calories in the morning. I don't eat well, I have a small appetite and usually end up eating half a sandwich and my main meal. I will see how the youngest goes with having more milk, 4 extra pints a week will only cost 95p more so should be doable.

£11 per day per person.

I've just googled it OP and the NHS website reckons a 7yo should have about 1600cals a day. So depending on activity levels and gender your 6yo should probably have about 1400. So if your 2 year old has about 1200, your middle one should be somewhere between. Depending on your height and activity levels your calorie intake would vary, but it sounds like you aren't eating enough OP. I'm sure it must be very hard and you do have my sympathy. I'd defo speak to the HV and get some vitamins in to give you all an extra boost if you can. Good luck :)

How? I spend about £50 a week, with one big shop a month which is about 100 and their is only me and ds. What do you buy each week? Although as long as getting a healthy diet it doesn't matter what you spend on shopping.

I think so e people are being harsh on the op. I lived for years, well over a decade, below the poverty line. Almost all my meals were rice or pasta with cheap veg in Tom sauce. A tiny bit of cheese and maybe milk if I had some spare cash. Now I was an adult so not quite as essential as a child but I didn't go hungry and I was never underweight, not even close.

I used to have a slice of dry bread for breakfast and black tea. I reckoned if I could still taste the mould after scraping it off and toasting the bread then probably I needed to buy a new loaf.

I could never afford eggs but sometimes had tuna. I you buy beans and pulses dried then soak them and boil them they are pretty healthy and extremely cheap.

I did sometimes think my meals were a little boring but never even thought if myself as particularly poor. You just spend what you can afford and make the best of it.

Dh and his friends used to eat plain boiled lentils with plain boiled rice. That was a bit too crappy even for me!

We're a family of 4 and I spend about £25 a day on food. not sure I could do it on £25 a week, and I don't think my husband would be particularly thrilled. What sort of things do you buy?