Grocery Shopping for Your Pre-Planned Meals

How often have you rushed into your local store on the way home from work to purchase food for your evening meal without any idea of what you need or want to cook and ended up spending more time in the store than expected as well as purchasing a lot more food than you actually needed?

Grocery shopping like this will become a thing of the past once you make the decision to prepare your meals in advance. If you feel intimidated about prepping your meals for a week or month in advance, then the thought of shopping for the ingredients can seem totally overwhelming.

Do not worry as there are methods to make shopping for the ingredients much more manageable and enjoyable. Preparing your meals in advance becomes a lot more streamlined when you have the correct staples readily available.

Having staples readily available such as eggs, flour, oatmeal, a choice of spices and rice in your pantry and refrigerator, will mean that you have what you need to create almost any meal. By adding frozen vegetables and chicken into the mix will mean you are well ahead of the game.

To begin with decide on the meals you are going to prepare and then work out what ingredients you will need to purchase and what you already have at home. At the start of your meal prep journey you can concentrate on a small number of meals or a specific meal for each day.

Starting slowly will help you understand what is required for meal prepping and help you get ready for prepping your meals for an extended period. Some of the advantages of meal prepping include reducing the need for you to make multiple journeys to your local grocery store, and eliminating the need to have meals from fast food restaurants because you do not have time to cook a healthy meal.

One tip to speed up your grocery shop is to organize your shopping list by aisles. Online there are a number of templates that can help you plan your trip to the store and are divided by meats, baked items, perishables and many more.

A healthy diet contains a number of different elements, such as, fruit, vegetables, dairy and meat and your prepared meals need to include all of them. If, after prepping all of your meals you have any leftovers, keep them for the next time you prep more meals to keep food waste to a minimum or in the case of fruit and vegetable use them as snacks between meals.

Organize your pantry and refrigerator so that you can store and remove yours meals easily to save time. When everything has its own place, it makes it a lot easier to unpack your groceries each time.

Make grocery shopping more enjoyable by finding and including new recipes for your meals along with different spices and foods that you have not had before. While you might not enjoy all of the new spices and foods, but it is fun to experiment and try new stuff.

To make you shopping experience easier and more enjoyable, go online and print off a “grocery list” template to plan and organize your grocery list before you have even left your home.