While it’s good to be on a budget year-round, the post-holiday season may be a necessary time for most people to trim their grocery bills. Dietitians have some ideas you may not have thought of to cut grocery receipts while still eating healthy.

“I grew up in a very frugal household … Now I’m shopping for a family of five and we live in a part of the country with a high cost of living. With that frugal mindset, there are some foods that just never make it into my grocery cart,” says Sarah Pflugradt, PhD, RDN, CSCS, health studies professor at American University and at Salubrious by Sarah.

Here, we’ve put together a list of healthy foods dietitians don’t buy when sticking to a budget.

Time is money. So more convenient foods are often more expensive. This is the case with single-serving packs of nuts, trail mix, jerky, meat sticks, crackers with cheese and even yogurt. You’re mostly paying for packaging.

Instead: Spend an hour or so on the weekend pre-portioning snacks from tubs of yogurt and bulk bags of snacks into reusable containers. Buy a food scale to make portioning easier.

“I never buy soda or caffeinated bubbly waters. I’m not even sure how much they cost, but it’s just not in our budget,” says Pflugradt. “Plus if it’s not in the house, my kids get used to drinking plain water.”

Pricey specialty “health” drinks can include bottled smoothies, kombucha, vitamin waters, detox teas, wellness shots, energy drinks and more. While some of these fancy drinks have legitimate benefits like the probiotics found in kombucha, they are often high in added sugar, low in the nutrients that are easily available from other sources and expensive for the benefits that they actually deliver.

Instead: Drink water, homemade unsweetened tea, homemade kombucha or a simple smoothie from scratch.

Every year a list of the Dirty Dozen fruits and vegetables is released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The EWG recommends that organic versions of produce on the list should be purchased. If you follow this, you’re almost always purchasing the most expensive strawberries, blueberries, spinach and nine other varieties of fruits and veggies. Dietitians disagree.

The issue is that 85 to 90 percent of Americans are not eating enough fruits and vegetables period.

Unfortunately, telling people to buy only organic spinach can leave them afraid to buy any spinach, because they think it’s unsafe. And if they like spinach and strawberries and blueberries, and aren’t buying them, they may be eating less produce.

Instead: Buy any type of produce that fits your budget. That includes frozen, canned and fresh produce that’s conventional, ugly, local or organic (if affordable).

Dietitians have encouraged people to stop worrying about pesticides and other issues. Over 30 years of research and data-collection on pesticide residues have determined that residue levels are well below safety tolerances levels.

These packaged meals might be a microwave-ready chicken bowl found in the refrigerator section of the supermarket, or it might be a mail-delivered dinner-assembly kit. Both may be budget-friendly when compared to a restaurant meal. But that’s where the comparison stops.

“It’s usually cheaper to buy the ingredients found in a meal kit separately and put them together on your own,” says Pflugradt. “That’s generally true even for a household of one.”

Instead: Buy the ingredients instead of a pre-made meal, or all the small amounts of delivered ingredients.

Take a kit of ingredients for chicken rice bowls, for example. Instead, buy a whole bag of brown rice and a bottle of teriyaki sauce along with a bag of frozen chicken breasts and frozen vegetables, and assemble it all at home.

Even after making the meal, you’ll probably have leftovers of the ingredients to use in lunches. That’s two (or more) meals for the price of one.

Packaged salad dressings can literally get kids (and adults) to eat their vegetables. But they can also languish in the refrigerator and expire, so a new bottle is purchased and the same wasteful cycle repeats.

Additionally, store-bought dressings can contain a whole list of unnecessary sugars, artificial sweeteners, oils or preservatives.

Instead: Buy the inexpensive ingredients used to make homemade dressings – or skip their purchase because you probably already have them in the pantry.

“I don’t buy pre-cut fruits or vegetables – except bagged salad – although I do understand the convenience of having those available. If you have the time, it’s cheaper to cut that watermelon, cantaloupe or butternut squash on your own,” says Pflugradt.

Instead: Set the timer and time how long it takes you to cut a watermelon or butternut squash. It will probably take around 10 minutes. Then you can accurately judge if you have the time to chop, or if you’d rather pay the two to three times higher price tag for pre-cut produce.

Some of the healthiest protein bars are very expensive. Some of the lower-ranking bars are almost candy in disguise, can have a long list of preservatives, artificial sweeteners, food dyes – or may have fiber boosters that can cause tummy troubles.

Again, we’re paying for convenience.

Instead: Buy your favorite box of protein bars and make it last twice as long as it used to, or even longer.

We get it, protein bars are a very convenient way to pack protein on the go; but so are string cheese, hard-boiled eggs, Greek yogurt prepped into jars or homemade energy bars. So between those bars, throw these protein-packed, budget-friendly foods into the mix.

And we know, protein bars also come in lots of exciting flavors. But if you’re bored of string cheese, try pairing it with new combos of fruits or vegetables like cucumbers, dried apricots, prunes or fresh pears.