Shopping

Good grocery shopping habits can make dieting a lot easier. If you have your house full of healthy food and minimal junk food, your chances of actually eating food that is healthy and lower in calories are much greater.

There are two crucial rules you should always obey when shopping:

• Don’t go shopping hungry.

• Have a shopping list beforehand.

That’s it. Two rules, as simple as they get. But they help a lot more than you think. What particularly gets some people is snack buying. Both rules will help you fight against that.

To make the shopping list, it helps if you have a “pre-shopping list”, which is the foods that you generally eat. For example, in the food list I provided, there are countless options. There are over 30 foods to choose from for protein alone. However, I don’t eat most of them, and you likely won’t either.

Make a list of the foods that you enjoy and that you know you will eat often. For example: salmon, chicken, beef and eggs. So when you are making your next shopping list, you can visit this list and see what you should buy. You see that you generally eat these 4, so you can decide that this week you will eat eggs and beef, for example. So you put this in the shopping list. You can do this for every food group. This makes the shopping list easier to do as you already have a list of foods you generally eat and you can choose from there.

There is a 3rd rule I like to advise: don’t buy unhealthy food unplanned. Note that this doesn’t mean you can’t buy it. I’m not a fan of restrictive plans, and if you really want a small bag of potato chips and you can fit it into your plan, nothing bad will happen. However, the crucial thing here is that you need to plan it. Don’t be in the grocery shop, walking along the snack section, and impulsively grabbing a bag off the shelf. If you want any type of “treat”, it needs to be on the shopping list, and you must have decided to have it the day prior.

If you’re tempted to buy a snack or some other junk food, remind yourself of this rule. “Ok, if I really want to, I can have it. But I’m not going to buy off impulse. I can put it on my shopping list for next time and get it then”.

It also helps if you shop in the same supermarket each time. This way, you will know exactly where the items you need are, and you will avoid searching around the whole shop (and of course, ending up in the cookie section!). If you can’t have a consistent supermarket, a good rule of thumb is to avoid the inner aisles. What you generally need are in the perimeter: vegetables, fruit, dairy, meat, and fish.