Learning to shop all over again

January 8th, 2010 - So now that I am eating healty the next logical step is learning how to shop healthy. First, you need to know, I HATE grocery shopping. I consider it a very redundant exercize. You take items off the shelf and put into your cart, you take the items out of the cart and put them on the conveyor belt, you then take the items off the conveyor belt and put them in a bag, cart them home, take the items out of the bags and put back on the shelf. REDUNDANT. You end up where you started only $100 poorer. If it weren't for my love affair with food, I would never enter a grocery store. But I regress. Time to re-learn how to shop. There are two important things you need to learn when shopping healthy, 1) shop the perimeter and 2) read labels. I started out in the vegetable department and picked up a tomato. I turned it every which way, til it was almost tomato sauce, but I'll be damned if I could find a label. I looked at multiple fruits and vegetablles and all I could find was a chiquita label on a banana. You see the label part comes in if you are foolish enough to enter the inner aisle, the forbidden territory. The place where all the really good food is stored.

When reading labels you need to be armed with a pair of bifocal glasses, a magnifying glass, and a lot of time and patience. I am ready, pick up the item, read the label, see it is good for you and place in the cart. I pick up a box of rice and find out that a serving is equal to one half cup, I pick up noodles and see the same thing, pasta the same, are you kidding me, I eat a half a cup just tasting the food to see if it is cooked al dente. The next thing I learn is that everything I would like to eat is loaded with sodium, sugar, and fat, and all have more than the recommended amounts allowed in a week, much less a day. And lastly, most of the food I love has stuff in it that I have never heard of, but will never forget and will think of each time I attempt to eat the item. This is not good. After finally finding a few items I can eat I leave the store with 2 small bags, 2 bloodshot eyes, from reading the fine print, and a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, called hunger. I thought this healthy eating would be a piece of cake, but ofcourse you know I can't have cake, this healthy eating has to be done in small doses, very small doses. I decided to do the only thing I could think of at the moment. Go over to Billy's have a burger, with only half a bun, a diet coke and a bag of chip...hold the label.