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Navigating the Grocery Store
Grocery shopping can be a harrowing experience – you fight the crowds for a decent parking space, try to remember what you needed to buy, and race through the isles, trying not to mow down screaming children with your grocery carriage. But if you’re a smart shopper, you can easily buy healthy groceries that will influence you to make good food choices all week. Here are five tips to get started. Go to the grocery store after you’ve already eaten. If you are going to the grocery store after a full day of work, bring a small snack at the beginning of the day to keep in your car – something that will give you energy and make you feel full, like nuts, cheese, cut up vegetables, fruit, a hard boiled egg, or a protein bar with no sugar. If you feel satisfied when you go grocery shopping, you’re much less likely to make healthy decisions instead of giving in to cravings for sugary, processed foods. Shop around the perimeter of the store. Grocery stores know that it’s easiest to keep the foods with the highest turnover rate (i.e., those that spoil the fastest) on the outside of the store. That way, they can stock and replace these foods more quickly as people buy them. These are things like vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, cheese, eggs, and dairy products. For the most part, the foods around the edge of the store are the healthiest foods. They are rich in nutrients that will keep you healthy and energetic. They do not contain lots of preservatives and have not been refined to remove all the good nutrients. By contrast, often the foods in the middle of the grocery store have been sitting on the shelves for month, sometimes even years! They have had many of their nutrients removed by refining and processing. They are full of sugar, white flour, and corn syrup, which are very easy for your body to store as fat. They often contain unhealthy trans fats. They will drain you of energy and cause you to crave more sugary, nutrient-poor foods. Foods on the edge of the grocery store will almost always give you more nutritional bang for your buck. There are a few exceptions to the “perimeter rule.” The first is the bakery section: the place where breads, cookies, cakes, and pies are sold. This is a section to avoid walking past at all. There is no temptation if you never walk past in the first place. Why make it hard on yourself? The second exception is for products like bottled water, seltzer, teas, cooking spices, and nuts. They are usually kept on the inside isles of the grocery store, and they are, in my opinion, the only reasons to venture into that domain! Read labels and ingredients carefully. It seems like a shame to have all the information about what’s contained in a food right there on the packaging, and then not use it! But for some people, reading labels is confusing and too time consuming. Here are a few hints to make it easier. First, a good rule of thumb is, the shorter the ingredient list, the healthier the food. Long ingredient lists usually mean lots of processed foods, additives, and preservatives. You can’t go wrong with foods that have only one ingredient: for example, vegetables, eggs, fruits, unprocessed meats, nuts, etc. Look in your kitchen right now, and read some labels from foods that you have in your house. How many of them have ingredients that you can’t pronounce? Do you really want to be eating those? Even if a food is fortified with vitamins (like flour, cereal, and pasta), it’s usually because all of its nutrients have been refined away and now need to be added back. But adding back some nutrients does not replace everything that’s lost. You can bet that natural, unprocessed foods have the highest amount of nutrients that are good for your body. After you look at the ingredients, look at the label that lists nutritional information. Ask a nutritionist or your doctor to give you a realistic estimate (based on your age, sex, activity level, body composition, and other factors) of how many calories you should be eating a day to maintain your current weight, or to change your weight. Look at how many calories a food contains, and think about how much of your daily calorie “budget” it will take up if you eat a serving of this food. How about if you eat a serving of this food twice? The serving sizes listed on the label are often much smaller than you think they are. Often, a container will have more than one serving inside of it, even though the nutritional information given on the label is only for one serving! Tricky, tricky. And always, always, think about whether the food you are eating contains vitamins and nutrients that will make you feel healthy and happy, or whether it just contains empty calories. How can you get the most nutritional bang for your buck? Is there a better choice that you could make instead of this food? Finally, if you know you don’t want to be eating a food, just don’t buy it! This is much easier to do when your appetite is satiated and you don’t feel stressed out. Try this technique: imagine that you are shopping for your good friend who is trying to eat a healthier diet. You get to be in charge of everything your friend eats this week. Select foods for your friend, and know that whatever goes into that grocery cart will eventually go into your friend’s mouth. You will get great results this way, because you already know what food choices are best. If you don’t have nutritionally empty, sugary, and processed foods in your home, you won’t be able to eat them when you’re there!
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