Nutrition
Building healthy habits into our day-to-day routines, is the foundation of healthy living. The grocery store is a great place to start. Navigating the grocery store can sometimes feel like a battlefield. We’re blasted with clever marketing and fantastic health claims on even the most unhealthy of items. We’ll often go in for one thing and come out with bags of other stuff. The following outlines some grocery store shopping habits that might help make grocery shopping more successful for us.
- Plan to shop and shop with a plan. By pre-planning the meals you intend to eat between grocery shops, you end up saving money, wasting less food, and can be better focused on your nutrition goals. Consider your week ahead; decide what you want to eat in advance of heading to the grocery store in order to buy the foods to help build your meals, as opposed to simply buying snack foods.
- Eat in season. As the seasons change, so does the available produce. Try new fruits and vegetables, spices and low calorie seasonings. By trying new things the diet stays interesting and you end up getting a wide variety of different micronutrients like vitamins, minerals, zoonutrients, myconutrients and phytonutrients. This is better than any multivitamin!
- Read labels and research nutrition information. Practicing to read labels, and taking some time to look up nutritional information as you are in the supermarket considering new foods helps you stay closer to your macronutrient targets, and gives you a better overall handle on understanding food’s nutrient values in general. This in turn will make estimating macronutrient intake more accurate and perhaps even subconscious – even when you’re not really thinking about it.
- Shop the perimeter of the store and walk down aisles with tunnel vision. Grocery stores have put a lot of money into researching product placement and your likelihood to purchase specific items. This has lead to a generalized standard of whole, unprocessed foods like meats, vegetables and fruits being placed around the perimeter of the store, and the highly palatable processed foods with longer shelf lives, lining the shelves in-between. Out of sight is truly out of mind. Refrain from walking down the aisles unnecessarily. Shop for fresh produce, fruits and vegetables first. Having more fresh fruits and vegetables in the cart makes a person less likely to pile up the less healthy processed foods on top. When you need a specific thing that’s normally placed on the shelves like coffee, tea, peanut butter, spices, rice, or pickles – stay as focused as possible on the specific items you are looking for as opposed to browsing everything else on the shelves. Don’t walk down the pop or candy aisles.
- Avoid the junk foods that are your weaknesses. It’s a lot easier to say no to buying a certain junk food, than it is to say no to eating it when it’s already in your home. If there are certain junk foods that you know you cannot resist, it’s best to leave them at the store.
- Eat before you go. Don’t go shopping on an empty stomach. When people grocery shop while hungry, they tend to make less healthy buying choices, purchasing calorie dense foods that are convenient enough to eat without much effort. A hungry person is more likely to buy a hyper-palatable processed food in a box or bag that can simply be opened and eaten, over fresh broccoli and salmon that would require preparation.
- Chew gum, or suck on a mint. Often, junk food cravings that occur when we grocery shop stem from imagining the sensory details of eating the foods we love. We imagine the texture of a chip’s crunch as we walk down the chip aisle, or the feel of a warm soft cookie, as we smell the baked goods coming from the bakery section. We can distract our senses and prevent these strong sensory imagines, thus preventing cravings while we shop by chewing on a piece of gum or sucking on a sugar-free mint.
Some key items that we should all opt to keep well stocked at home are outlined in the below table:
| Lean Protein | High Volume Carbohydrates | Moderate Volume Carbohydrates | Fats |
| Egg whites
Whey isolate powder Chicken breast Turkey breast Extra lean ground beef Lean cuts of beef (Inside round, sirloin, etc.) Canned tuna Frozen tuna Fat free cheese / cottage cheese Fat free Greek yogurt Shrimp, prawns & calamari White / light fish |
Celery
Cucumber Asparagus Mushrooms Leafy greens Kohlrabi Tomatoes Spaghetti Squash Green beans Cauliflower Zucchini Bell peppers Blueberries Strawberries Melons Rice cakes / crackers |
Potatoes (sweet & white)
Oatmeal Rice Tortillas Cereal (with low sugar content) Pasta Breads Bananas Dried fruit
|
Avocado
Nuts Nut butters Whole eggs Olive oil Coconut oil Full fat dairy products Cooking spray Coconut |
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