shopping_list

Notes:

*First of all, I have found it easier to always eat before heading to the grocery store. Sound strange? Well, when on a low-calorie diet and hungry, the last thing you want to do is expose yourself to the many, many varieties of less than optimal foods! The craving that you feel is greatly magnified when running low on fuel. To me, it's like resistance training on an empty stomach. It's hard to "resist" when all you can think about is eating. Get my point? Shopping while your hungry makes you notice all those less than nutritional items that you would normally walk past without a blink of the eye. With your body continually signaling to your brain that it is in dire need of something and it could care-less what that something is.

*Preparing a shopping list before heading to the grocery store is just as important as eating a small meal and even more, I think. The shopping list I build will contain several types of meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, and dairy products that I will need. When building the list, I take advantage of the master list shown above. The benefit I realize is that my master list has taken the guess-work out of your shopping experience which translates into lower stress! Although I usually won't purchase everything that makes it on the shopping list, it serves as a guide.

*Research Nutritional Contents - In order for me to know exactly what I'm taking in and its content provides invaluable knowledge. It will provide a road map to success when a goal is achieved and provide me the exact diet that helped me get there. It will also provide a chance to decide on alternatives when dieting. I will easily know what foods I may substitute for others when I just need a change. Most of all, it allows me to know the optimal foods to buy versus the ones that are marketed as optimal foods. For instance, foods advertised as "low-fat" are not always a good buy! If you look at the number of grams of carbohydrates, particularly the grams of sugar, it can be astronomical. I have provided a link to the USDA site (http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl) that detalils the content of most food. There is also the calorie counter page that is linked from my main page.