Meal Prep 101- Grocery Shopping

Why meal prep??

For me, I am always burning both ends so to speak. My days are go-go-go from the time I wake till the time I sleep but I wouldn't have it any other way. As someone who battles hypoglycemia on the daily, my blood sugar can drop at anytime which makes it even more important for me to have things on hand. I have learned that if I don't have meals prepped I will grab anything processed and quick to prepare to get my blood sugar where it needs to be.

Most people think that meal prepping is difficult and takes forever. In the beginning it may be tricky but I promise, you will quickly get the hang of things and be able to prepare your meals for the entire week within two hours (including clean up)!

So obviously we are going to have to make a trip to the grocery store to get what we need. But what should we buy? Keeping macros in mind, we need to stick with as many clean or unprocessed foods as much as possible, this means most of your shopping will be done on the perimeter of the store not the asiles. The only things you should be picking up from the asiles should be things like rice, beans, oats, seasonings, water (if you so choose) or tea or coffee, rice cakes and maybe some protein bars and/or peanut butter.

I always start with my protein. I pick two or three different styles of lean protein in addition to eggs and other non-meat items. So you could choose chicken, turkey, lean beef, fish, or even bison. Then choose how you want the format of eat meat. For instance, do you want ground turkey or turkey breasts? For me, I like to buy my protein in bulk to help save money. Don't be afraid to utilize your freezer. This goes for any meat, eggs, powders, and bars. Heck you can buy your peanut butter in bulk to but if you are like me this doesn't work out too well... I tend to get a bit carried away, oopsie!

Then I figure out what veggies I want to pair with each meal as well as some fruits and then carbs. So you could say, ok for three meals I want chicken breasts with rice and broccoli. We want to try to get in as many veggies as possible with each meal because they are great "volume foods", or foods that give you huge portions per single serving. These will help you feel more full and leave you more macros to work with.

A little trick for you. I am a huge fan of throwing in spinach with my smoothies to get in more greens. But spinach tends to wilt pretty quickly so I like to buy my spinach in bulk then portion out servings into baggies and freeze them that way I always have it on hand for smoothies. Same goes for bananas, if your bananas start to go bad cut them up and freeze them for smoothies. Buying frozen berries in bulk is a great way to save money also.

There are a couple of staple-items that I have seen majority of athletes use that are not meat or produce. You may want to add these to your diet:

-Raw Oats

-Puffed Rice Cereal

-Reduced-sodium or raw nuts like almonds

-Walden Farms Sugar-free pancake syrup

-Sugar-free jelly

-Reduced-sugar ketchup

-Salsa

-Salt-free seasonings or pink himalayan sea salt

-Stevia

-Black or Gabanzo Beans

-Unsweetened almond milk

-Greek Yogurt

-Rice cakes

-Sugar-free jelly

-Protein bars and powder

-Brown Rice

-Coffee creamer

-Peanut butter or PB2

-Coconut oil or extra light olive oil.

These are acceptable items you may pick up in the aisles. You will soon find that with tracking macros and meal prepping that you may rotate between eating the same things. In fact, your grocery list may be very similar each week and that is totally fine! If you find things you enjoy and they work for you, awesome!

As always, if you are unsure if something is truly good for you go straight to the ingredient list. Watch out for artificial sugars like aspartame and sucralose. Most brands are getting better about sweetening things with stevia so be on the lookout.

I have also included a great video from BodyBuilding.com to help you all :)

I hope this was helpful for you! As always, let me know if you have any questions. Take a deep breath, you've got this. You will be a pro in no time! :)

-xxoo Britt