In order to get the food in your mouth, you gotta get the food in your house.
Here’s how to grocery shop with macro tracking in mind:
1. Make a grocery list organized by section of the grocery store. Visualize your walk through the store, listing the items you need by major sections – produce, bakery, pantry, dairy, butcher, frozen.
2. Ensure there are some protein-, fat- and carbohydrate-heavy items in several of the grocery sections on your list. Grab carbohydrate dominant fruits and vegetables in the produce, frozen and pantry sections. Find protein dominant meat, fish, poultry, eggs in the dairy, butcher, and frozen sections. Nuts, seeds, avocados, coconut products, cheese are spread throughout. Take a once-over glance at your list and make sure you’ve got a mix of P, F, and Cs coming from multiple sections of the store for meal variety.
3. Identify fresh, frozen and shelf stable proteins, fats and carbohydrates. You don’t want to rely on meat, fish and poultry exclusively to meet your protein goals – just like you wouldn’t want to rely solely on cooking oils to meet your fat goals or rice and sweet potatoes for carbohydrate goals. It’s best to have choice!
4. Where possible, get foods that can make for “macro manipulatable meals”. These are meals that you can dial up or down the P, F and C content based on your needs and preferences in the moment. Prepackaged items like frozen meals, family size platters, snack food, meal replacements, foods packaged with sauces, cream, cheese – don’t allow freedom to add or subtract P, F or Cs. Instead, purchase ingredients to build your own meals that are balanced the way that YOU want, according to your macro goals on a specific day.
