I tracked my grocery spending for 6 months after going plant-based and the numbers don't make sense

Old habits die hard. When I left my finance career at 36, I thought I'd left spreadsheets behind forever.

But five years later, when I made the switch to plant-based eating, something in me needed to track the numbers. Call it professional curiosity. Call it anxiety about change. Either way, I opened a fresh spreadsheet and started logging every grocery receipt.

What I found after six months genuinely confused me. The numbers told a story, but it wasn't the one I expected to read.

The myth I believed going in

Like most people, I'd absorbed two competing narratives about plant-based eating and money. The first: veganism is expensive, full of specialty products and organic everything. The second: beans and rice are cheap, so you'll save a fortune.

I figured the truth was somewhere in the middle, and my spreadsheet would reveal exactly where.

My first month, I spent 23% more than my previous omnivore average. I panicked a little. I was buying cashew cheese, fancy plant milks, and every meat alternative I could find. The numbers seemed to confirm the "expensive" narrative. But here's where it gets interesting.

The spending curve nobody talks about

By month three, my spending had dropped to 8% below my old baseline. By month six, I was spending roughly 15% less than before. The curve wasn't linear, and it wasn't about willpower or deprivation. It was about learning.

Those first weeks, I was essentially buying two pantries: my old staples plus all the new plant-based products I thought I needed. I was also making mistakes, buying ingredients for recipes I never made, letting produce go bad because I didn't know how to use it efficiently yet.

What changed wasn't my budget. It was my competence. Have you ever noticed how expensive it is to be a beginner at anything?

The hidden cost that disappeared

Here's where the numbers stopped making sense to me. My grocery spending dropped 15%, but my total food spending dropped nearly 30%. I stared at the spreadsheet for a long time before I understood.

I'd stopped eating out as much. Not because I was avoiding restaurants, but because I'd become genuinely interested in cooking. When you're excited about the meal you're making at home, the convenience of takeout loses its pull.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American household spends roughly half their food budget on meals away from home. I'd shifted that ratio dramatically without trying.

This wasn't discipline. It was desire. And my spreadsheet couldn't capture that transformation.

What the numbers couldn't measure

My finance brain wanted clean data, clear conclusions. But the most significant changes weren't showing up in any column. I was wasting less food because I'd learned to plan meals around what needed to be used.

I was buying fewer impulse items because I actually knew what I wanted to cook. I was spending more time in the produce section and less time wandering aisles of packaged foods.

Research from the Lancet Planetary Health suggests that plant-based diets can be more cost-effective than omnivore diets in high-income countries. But that data point felt almost irrelevant to my experience. The money was a side effect of something deeper: I'd developed a new relationship with food itself.

The real question the spreadsheet raised

After six months, I closed the spreadsheet. Not because I had my answer, but because I realized I'd been asking the wrong question. I'd approached this transition like I approached everything in my finance days: as a problem to optimize, a variable to control.

But going plant-based isn't a financial decision. It's a values decision that happens to have financial implications. When I stopped tracking and started just living this way, I noticed something my spreadsheet never could have captured: I felt lighter. Not just physically, but mentally.

The constant background noise of cognitive dissonance, knowing my food choices conflicted with my values, had gone quiet.

What's that worth? How do you put that in a column?

Final thoughts

If you're considering plant-based eating and worried about cost, here's what I wish someone had told me: the first few months will probably be more expensive. You're learning. You're experimenting. You're building a new pantry and a new skill set. That's an investment, not a failure.

But the numbers will shift. And more importantly, so will you. The spreadsheet that matters isn't the one tracking your receipts. It's the one tracking whether you're living in alignment with what you actually believe.

That calculation, I've found, always comes out in your favor.