I’m always ashamed to admit how long I’ve been struggling with my weight. My mother put me on the Beverly Hills diet (which involved eating only fruit for the first ten days) when I was 11 and I’m now 57, so that’s nearly half a century.Having tried every diet available, and still ending up a size 20, I gave up pointless regimes in my late 30s, when I wrote a book called ‘Fat, So?’, about how dieting actually makes us fat. Since then, I’ve just tried to eat healthily.That means eschewing ultra-processed food and cooking from scratch. In my case, it also means being seduced by the array of posh but extremely pricey healthy ingredients out there.I’ve spent a small fortune on the likes of quinoa, chia seeds, kombucha and matcha tea, with very small change in my figure – now, thanks largely to Pilates, a size 16-18 – and absolutely no loose change left in my wallet.This has to end. With inflation pushing up food prices on what feels like a weekly basis, most of us are hard pressed to make our mortgage payments every month, never mind splashing out on pre-prepared bone broth at £5 a sachet. At this rate it won’t matter whether I can look good in a bikini – I won’t be able to afford a holiday anyway.So is it really possible to kill two birds with one stone? To lose weight on a healthy diet and save money?I decide to set myself a challenge. For one whole month I will spend £1 on each meal I eat. Yes, £3 a day; £21 a week. My husband and 23-year-old son don’t believe their self-confessedly greedy wife and mother can do this. But I am determined to prove it.I could just live off Diet Coke and Reduced Fat Baked Beans for a month, like a student, but that’s not me and my family would cry foul immediately. So I need to plan this. Susannah Jowitt before her challenge of spending £1 on each meal with the aim of losing weight and saving moneyFirst, I do some pre-diet shopping and invest £20 in what I deem to be cheap essentials: oats, a few basic dried herbs and spices, olive oil, lemons, brown rice, a bulb of garlic, a flask of soy sauce.For inspiration, I look online at the many One Pound Meal, beat-the-budget websites and Instagram accounts but soon realise their £1 is not the same as mine.One influencer’s Chorizo and Corn Super Salad, for example, actually costs about £2.50 per person, and only then when prepared as a meal for four. Besides, it’s fattening.And I’m in this alone. No one else in my family will be tackling the twin evils of price and waist inflation. I am going to make sure my ingredients fit the bill to the nearest penny.I also decide to visit a Randox Health clinic where I take a series of tests called an Everywoman Basic, which measure up to 150 markers from weight and blood sugar, to cholesterol levels and visceral fat. I discover my BMI is 35, with a waist measurement of 101cm. I will repeat these tests at the end of my month.In week one, I play it safe with omelettes and boiled eggs, lentils, and tiny servings of potatoes, with the cheapest veg I can find in the supermarket: cabbage, carrots and other roots, steamed. This is quite the come-down from my weekly shop, which usually consists of meat or fish every night. Susannah lost 10cm around her waist and her BMI dropped from obese to overweight after the challengeAs a household, we are heavy on carb-based side dishes, but take a global approach to cuisine, with lots of exotic veg such as pak choi or fancy salads that often feature expensive touches like pomegranate seeds, caramelised pecans and chunks of halloumi.And then, of course, I drink at least two, often three, bottles of wine a week. It is not cheap. For the three of us, I usually spend about £150.But now, by being forensic on what I buy, I cut my £50 share by more than half. On my new regime, I am costing the household less than £20.I should save the £30 weekly difference – instead, I find myself looking online to see how much a new bikini costs.And yet there are several big problems with this legume and boring veg regime. Even though I hit my £1 targets, the meals are repetitive and tasteless – and I feel stodgy and flatulent.What’s more, I only lose two pounds in this first week.So I consult a nutritionist friend, Janey Bullivant, for inspiration.‘You definitely don’t have to sacrifice taste and zing when you eat healthily and cheaply,’ she laughs. ‘People often revert to plain steamed nursery food when they want to lose weight but those Asian and Mediterranean touches you love are also the way to make a healthy regime tasty and sustainable.’ Susannah threw a dinner party and served guests with three courses for less than £1.50 a head, including smoked mackerel pate with sweet-pickled cucumber Susannah cooked nutrient-dense food, such as boiled eggs, within her £1 budget, shaving off calories and still titillating her taste budsWith Janey’s help, but putting in my own little spins and occasional mini-treats, I come up with meal plans for each week. The goal is to cook nutrient-dense food from scratch, with each meal bursting with antioxidant goodness but also fitting within my £1 budget.I am shaving off calories but still titillating my taste buds and including just enough naughtiness – such as the occasional piece of smoky bacon or a teaspoon of cream cheese – to make me feel I still love mealtimes.‘On this budget, you’re hard-pushed to include as much protein as I would recommend, so it shouldn’t be a permanent plan,’ explains Janey. ‘What works is a sensible, non-extreme approach that can be sustained.‘You absolutely can lose weight if you eat three meals a day without the blood-sugar rollercoaster of snacking in between. The basic rule is to fill your plate in quarters. One full quarter is protein, under a quarter is wholegrain-only carbs, and then add a good thumb’s worth of healthy fats and oils. Fill in the remaining two quarters with veg. And eat only one daily portion of fruit at most.‘Yes, you can follow rules if you want. By all means calorie count. You should indeed leave 12 hours between supper and breakfast. You can eat the protein at breakfast, and plenty of oily fish for omega fats.But if you start to obsess about always keeping to these rules, you are in danger of letting so-called food noise – constant worrying and thinking about food – get to you. And that’s when the plan becomes unsustainable.’‘What is almost as important as what you eat, is how you eat it. If you eat your meal plan with enjoyment, adding touches that make you appreciate it even more, like a dash of sweet chili sauce or a ‘naughty’ banana for breakfast, and sit down to eat it slowly, to savour it, then you will be satisfied, not just physiologically but psychologically, which is important for maintaining healthy eating.’Stress, she explains, is the secret villain of dieting. Becoming obsessed with calorie counting, or the hours you’ve fasted, or the glycaemic blood sugar count of a kernel of corn, all increases the body’s stress hormone cortisol.And with cortisol comes physical cravings and disrupted sleep, both of which sabotage weight loss and encourage the body to store fat around the middle.‘Enjoy yourself,’ is her parting advice to me, ‘and you’ll eat well, sleep well, exercise well and lose weight. It’s a question of common sense versus cortisol.’Cooking for me is both relaxation and a pleasure, and I know I am in danger of falling at the first hurdle on my lentil-and-potato diet. The Yorkshire girl within me, however, is enjoying the challenge of cost-cutting. So, for weeks two and three, I get more adventurous with food, while rising to the challenge of doing it without expense.I love returning to the economical foodstuffs of my student days – such as tinned fish, pulses and the more basic fruits and veg – and the creative recipes I came up with back then when I had time to think but no money. I have become more mindful about food, focused on economy but also less distracted by fads and that absurd way shops have of naming their food.In the shadow of a cost-of-living crisis, do I care if my chicken comes from Fluffles Farm and my tomatoes from a vine that sounds like a prima ballerina? No, now I reach for the supermarkets’ economy ranges. Before I might have turned my nose up at wonky carrots, generically packaged vegetables, the Stamford Street basics line at Sainsbury’s, the simple fare at Lidl and Aldi beside the flashier- packaged ready meal ranges. But now I actively seek them out.I’m also following my mother’s old nose-to-tail habit of using every last morsel of an animal – and get five meals out of one chicken. This makes me happy. A day on the £1 diet BREAKFASTThree boiled eggs (60p) and handful of spinach either raw or steamed (15p) with a sprinkling of Greek salad cheese (the cheap Lidl feta) at 22p for 50g.Total: 97pLUNCHRachel’s Friends saladActress Jennifer Aniston ate this every day for ten years on the Friends set, where she played Rachel Green.A third of a cucumber (23p), quarter red onion (8p), tbsp parsley (10p), tbsp mint (10p), all chopped small, with a third of a can of roasted chickpeas (22p), large handful of cooked brown rice (4p), 50g Greek salad cheese (22p) crumbled in.Total: 99pAdd handful of toasted Lidl seed mix at the last minute if you’ve got 25p in the bank.DINNERCourgetti smoke and mirrors raguSmoky bacon goes a long way to convince your palate you’re having a ragu – and the spiralised courgette can visually fool you into thinking it’s spaghetti.Spiralise half a courgette (19p) into your bowl. Fry half a small packet of smoked lardons (40p) then pick out the pieces and scatter them on the courgetti.In the remaining bacony oil, fry half a diced onion (16p) with a diced carrot (12p), a large handful of cooked red lentils (5p) then add 2 tbsps passata (15p).Blend in the saucepan with a wand blender and heat to bubbling, then season and pour over your courgetti and bacon.Total: £1.07DAILY TOTAL: £3.03Recipes Susannah’s own I even throw a dinner party in week three. Little do my guests know as they tuck into smoked mackerel pate with sweet-pickled cucumber, Vietnamese chicken salad and coconut rice pudding with fresh mango, that they are eating their three courses for less than £1.50 a head and ticking all manner of nutritional boxes.Of course, their halos are dimmed by tucking into wine too, but I am on the water, like a good girl, and I am quietly smug that this dinner is costing about £75 less than I usually spend feeding ten people.At the beginning of the last week, I do my weekly weigh-in, frowning down at the scales, as I work out that I have lost 7lb in all, half a stone in three weeks.It’s an acceptable result but nothing spectacular at my size, so I decide to up the ante for the last seven days, cutting portion sizes even more, taking out any naughty touches like that banana at breakfast, reducing even friendly carbs.It’s a disaster. Yes, I am still saving money but, suddenly, that’s not enough and the depression of my old dieting days is back – the food noise of the fridge calling to me grows ever-louder and I feel hungry and miserable all the time.I weigh myself every day now, sometimes twice, and snap at family members when they offer me a slice of my favourite rye toast.Fun though the penny-pinching is, it does mean I now think about the ‘maths’ of grocery shopping all the time, which means that mad old obsession with food has kicked back in.I don’t sleep for worrying about the final number on the weighing scales, castigating myself endlessly for being fat and staying fat. My husband gets both annoyed and alarmed by my tetchiness.‘How can all this be good for you if it makes you so bad-tempered?’ he asks towards the end of Week Four.I sit on my hands and count to ten before I explode.As a result, when I go for my post-month compare-and-contrast tests at Randox Health, my blood pressure is alarmingly elevated at 142/80, edging into the Stage 1 hypertension category where usually it is healthily low.I am, however, pleased with the rest of my markers, all of which are improved and in the ‘optimal’ range, not to mention the wonderful 10cm I’ve lost around my waist since the beginning of the month and the drop in my BMI from obese to overweight.Ironically, though, I haven’t lost a single pound in that last miserable week. In trying too hard at the end, I stopped enjoying myself and stopped the weight loss. I let the cortisol win instead of letting my mantra of common sense carry me across the finish line.As for my bank balance, I am £128 up on the month which I find hugely satisfying. Had I been able to persuade my husband and son to join me, we’d have saved almost £400.Since finishing the £1 regimen a week ago, I have relaxed the cost aspect a little. But some of the thriftiness – the comprehensive use of a chicken, the smaller portion sizes, the lack of snacking, the frontloading of protein – has stuck. I’ve had the odd glass of wine and more red meat.I’ve enjoyed my weight loss, slept well and have felt good wearing skimpier clothes in the heat.So imagine my surprise when I step onto the scales out of idle curiosity, to discover that I’ve lost a further three pounds in the week after stopping, bringing me up to ten pounds in five weeks.At this rate, if I carry on being thrifty – but keep cortisol at bay by enjoying my food – I might even be ready to debut that bikini on my August holiday.The Everywoman Basic test is available for £269 at randoxhealth.comJaney Bullivant is a Registered Nutritional Therapist at janeybullivant.com