There are two schools of thought when it comes to lifestyle change. One approach is the gentle, incremental approach. Baby steps. Dip the toe in. Coddle thyself. Learn a new thing, and then get totally used to it before progressing further. If you were to graph it, it's a slow gentle curve. A pleasantly rolling hill of adjustment.
The other approach is the crowbar method, aka the sink or swim method. It's a sudden and forced state change from the current state to the desired state. The graph of the crowbar approach is a cliff. Your 'quality of life', or rather your comfort of life, takes an immediate nosedive.
The crowbar approach is jarring. It can be scary. It's difficult.
It's also way more effective, if the violence of it doesn't cause an opposite reaction. This is worth emphasizing: some people do not do well with the crowbar method. In particular, people who have issues with authority. In general I'm all for having issues with authority, but some personalities will react against their own authority, and so they have difficulty with this method. Know thyself.
The immediate aftermath of the crowbar method tends to be unpleasant. Let's say you're crowbar'ing your food budget from $600/mo to $200/mo. One method is to put $200 cash in an envelope and say when the money runs out, you can't buy any more food. If you have the willpower to follow this rule, your motivation is going to be high indeed. Your skill at eating for $200 will rapidly increase, although your waistline might do the opposite. It's not going to be a fun couple of months while you build your skill. It will consume a large portion of your attention, and you will be uncomfortable.
But by about month six of this, the extreme level of motivation associated with not wanting to starve, or not wanting to subsist on dumpstered cupcakes for the last ten days of every month, will have resulted in some seriously impressive frugal food eating skills. You'll be a different person. You'll be proud of yourself for Doing a Hard Thing. Every bite of nutritious and delicious food you eat will taste like victory.
Contrast this with the easy does it approach, where for month one you work really hard on "not eating out quite so often", month two you buy some stuff in bulk, month three you actually look at how much money you spend on meat and think about maybe eating less of it unless it's really tasty looking though...
Eventually you'll get your cost down, over a period of several years, if you don't forget that you're actually trying to do something because the change in your life is so slight. Every month maybe you'll spend ten dollars less on your food than the month before. Some months you'll just kind of forget about it all and blow it, and then remember the next month, feel guilty, and get back on it.
Meanwhile, the crowbar'd individual has been saving $400/mo since month one, has developed master chef skills using whatever ingredients they can find (including cupcakes, why not), and has long since moved on to other endeavors in life.
Obviously, I'm a fan of the crowbar approach. But it is a spectrum. You can dial in how crowbar you want your efforts to be. I did not choose a pure crowbar approach for my food cost journey, for example. My approach was fairly aggressive but not a complete cliff.
It's good to know about the crowbar/incremental spectrum, to understand the tradeoffs between the two approaches, and be able to decide what approach will work best for you.