My Weight Loss Toolbox: Weekly, Detailed, Shopping List
Food/Calorie Journal
Scale
Walking App
Meal Calendar
Digital Food Scale that Weighs in Grams
Weekly, Detailed, Shopping List
Walking Buddy (My Daughter & My Dogs)
Yeti 36oz Rambler
Walking Shoes and Walking Socks
Let’s explore these one at a time.
Let’s talk before COVID. I was living in Wisconsin, 45 minutes away from Milwaukee. Our little city of just over 15,000 people was considered a rural city. Rural was a huge benefit for us, but it was not “too rural.” We had an Aldi, a Kwik Trip (best gas station ever) and a Walmart (I get the benefit, but Walmart was not necessary). If I needed groceries, I went to Aldi, (or if I needed something quick, Kwik Trip) found it on the shelf, paid for my food, bagged it up and came home. I knew food delivery was a thing – my husband and I have a friend that would get food delivered back in the day of Pea Pod (is Pea Pod a Midwestern thing?) To each there own, but I did not want my food delivered. I wanted to pick it out on the shelf – make sure the packaging was good – and most importantly, I needed to make sure my produce was the exact one I wanted. Do you know how crazy I look in the produce section, getting all handsy with the product?! For lettuce, I want a dense packed head – I lightly toss the head up in down in my hand checking the density. Melons have a thump, color, and smell. Cauliflower needs to be big, white, and the flowerets needs to be densely packed and not opening too far. Oranges – is the skin separating from the flesh? Skip it if it is. Onions – the size matters with the dishes I am making. Kind of. Not really. We seriously eat almost an onion a day in this house! Seriously, I had my own yesterday on my lunch and dinner salads. Bell peppers need to be crisp. You can feel crispness. Berries – are they too juicy? Cucumbers – they cannot be soggy – so I grab the girth of the cucumber and gently, but firmly, squeeze the vegetable, up and down its shaft – looking like a deprived deviant. It is ridiculous, but it is what I do, and I know the person or company picking my food is not going to go through this effort, so I elect to shop for my groceries. And unless I went through a company like Pea Pod, while living in Wisconsin, I did not have a different option to have food delivered. Curbside pick-up at Walmart started just before COVID and our Aldi did not do curbside or delivery.
I moved to the Philadelphia area and it seems everyone has deliveries and services and subscriptions of some sort. It is a culture shock for me – kind of. I cannot have our weekly groceries ordered or shipped, I need to go to the store and buy them, so I continue on with the way that I know and to each there own. (However, my husband and I investigated getting Diet Coke shipped to the house. Or the supplier delivering it. Or installing a Diet Coke soda gun and running a line in the kitchen. But the cost of this did not make sense so I just go to the store and buy it). If you are on the delivery spectrum of grocery shopping, this article may not pertain to you as much, but the basic principles can be followed by anyone.
I go grocery shopping on Mondays. I go during the day when most of the work force is working. I stay at home, so why clutter up the store with an unnecessary shopper on the weekend or in the evening when everyone else is trying to shop? Monday morning/early afternoon is my target time. This means I need to have my list made out ahead of time. And yes, I need a list. I cook/prepare every meal in the house, so I need to make sure I have everything.
My scrap piece of paper is broken down into sections. I visualize the grocery store (Aldi and Produce Junction) and I know where everything is and what sections and rows to find it in. Then I write my list according to the layout of the store.
First foods to go on the list are givens: eggs, milk, bread, energy drinks, Diet Coke, one snack item, breakfast item (last week it was avocados, before that we had a serving of cottage cheese with breakfast – every day for about two months). Next, I ask my husband if he would like anything. The answer is either no, popcorn, or cheese balls. Sometimes Aldi just happens to be sold out of all the cheese balls/puffs and there is no appropriate substitute that I could have picked up either. Next, I consult my meal calendar.
My meal calendar tells me the meals I am preparing for dinner. Lunch is usually leftovers, or if I need, one of the shelf safe/freezer safe meals that I save as an extra or a just in case. Or salads. Salads happens when we do not have leftovers, because I almost always have ingredients for salads (except on Sundays, I am usually out of almost everything, as that is leftover day). Breakfast is basically a given – all liquids and then that one item we are eating – avocado toast, eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt, smoothie, fruit…you get it. Each day, day by day, I think about the meal or I look up the recipe and I write down the ingredients I need, crosschecking to see if I already have the ingredient. If I do not have it – it goes on the list.
I then look at my “pantry.” I do not have an actual pantry, mine is a shelf in the kitchen, but a place to store my canned goods none the less. I have a set number of canned goods per product that stay on my shelf. The cans are four rows deep and can be stacked two high. When, we will say, black beans get to four cans or lower, I buy another four cans of black beans. Same goes with green beans, carrots, kidney beans, chickpeas, and olives. I do not replace canned corn, peas, and fruits as quickly, as I do not use them as often. When I bring the groceries home, I make sure to rotate all the goods. The older, previously in the house, canned goods rotate to the top of the two-decker canned stack and the new ones sit on the bottom. That way when I grab my canned goods for my meal, I am always grabbing the new cans, and nothing is going bad.
This first-in, first-out concept is what allows the meals to come out of the kitchen relatively smoothly. Each week I purchase the food that I will need for the week. If I do not use the ingredients, the ingredients will go bad. And I hate waste. Even if I am having a rotten day or things seem a bit crazy, I make the meal that I planned, that I purchased food for and that we are set up to enjoy. It helps keep me on track. Plus, when you eat as much fresh food as we do, the fridge is full with one week’s worth of produce! I hated having to buy food for several weeks – as there was quite a lack of fresh food come week two and week three.
Thanks for reading! Hope everyone is doing well. I will be back to post about my digital food scale in the next post. Have a great one, everyone!
Half A Human 