Today was the highly anticipated grocery shopping day. I’d spent some time going over the Nutritional Guide and decided to tackle this one week at a time. I created my menu for every day, 5 meals for each. I decided against immediately taking advantage of the wide variety of foods they had; that grocery list would be expensive! Instead I opted to make 2 different menus and alternate days for the first week, switching up the menus the next week.
I then made myself a very detailed shopping list for the menus. I left no wiggle room by listing things like “Nutritional Bars.” I actually wrote down what they recommended: 200 calories, less than 25 grams of sugar, about 10 grams protein. And that made a huge difference in what I know I would have normally gotten versus what I actually did get. Sorry Quaker Oats guy, I will no longer be indulging in multiple peanut butter and chocolate chip granola bars at one time.
The whole experience was actually pretty fun; I bought ground turkey for the first time in my life. I had a treasure hunt for feta cheese and whole wheat tortillas. My eyes were opened to a whole new world of healthy choices in the grocery store. I got about halfway through the excursion when I looked down at my cart and realized: this is what skinny people eat! Honest to goodness, this was the healthiest my shopping cart has ever looked! I had whole wheat everything, fruits, veggies, cheeses, yogurt and lean meats. Plus I still got to have steak! Score!
Along the way I notice things about other people while I’m shopping. You know how there’s always that one person that seems to be in every aisle you go down, taking it so far as to even get behind you in line to check out? Throughout the store I kept passing by and running into a little family. There was a mother with 2 kids, both elementary school ages. The mother was large, I’d put her around 300 lbs. or so. She walked after her kids at a sedate pace and every time the kids ran up to her asking if they could get something she said yes. Their cart was filled with things that are considered very typical of an American family: soda, ice cream, premade frozen meals, fried food from the deli… all things that I used to get. What really struck me was that she was wearing a muumuu. I kept looking at her cart and then looking at her thinking, this could have been me in a couple of years. If I keep up with the destructive eating habits I had collected then I was muumuu bound!
Yeah, I know, not a very nice thing to think about a complete stranger but for my second first experience of the day I actually smiled and felt good about all the food I had on the conveyer belt. That’s right… my food kicks your food’s butt.
No comments:
Post a Comment