Conquer The Supermarket.

This week I will help you conquer the supermarket in 5 sections:

1. The Big Picture 🖼️

2. Explain It To Me Like I’m 5 👦

3. Coach Matt’s Actual List, Broken Down. 📝

4. Skill ➡️ Practice ➡️ Action

5. Parting Zen 🧘‍♂️

Let’s begin.

The Big Picture 🖼️

My shopping list always follows a template.

My template periodically evolves and allows for fluidity … and at the same time always has a few core elements that rarely change.

My template makes sure I always have at least:

• 4 Proteins

• 4 Fruits

• 4 Vegetables

Plus other less perishable staples such as coffee, butter, nuts, protein bars, & canned tuna.

Whatever I’m not going to cook soon, I’ll buy frozen or freeze. (I’ll cover batch cooking in a future newsletter.)

Solidifying your template is a matter of practice.

You need to establish how often you’ll cook, which foods work best for you, regularly check inventory, dates, and so on.

I’ll get into specific examples below.

Explain It To Me Like I’m 5 👦

Today’s topic, as simply as possible:

“Nutrition is like a battle, and it begins at home.

If you have a good plan before you go to the store, you’ll win.”

Coach Matt’s Actual List, Broken Down. 📝

The blue text are the contents of my actual shopping list from July 10th, 2023, with some added graphic markup in green:

A few things to note:

I write the list on paper and keep it spaced in quadrants.

1. Dry items

2. Fresh produce

3. Frozen items

4. Meat

This helps make sure I follow my template, and never get ‘caught by surprise’ at home without food to cook.

It also helps to navigate the store efficiently.

I used ChatGPT to create an acronym for fresh produce!

Why? I noticed that I was buying the same fresh produce over & over again.

Thus, the sentence …

Popeye And Olive Lived On A Magical Boat

Pepper Apple Onion Lemon Orange Avocado Mushroom Banana

… ensures that even if I forget my list, I’ll know what to buy.

It’s flexible.

When in the store, depending on what looks fresh, or is on sale, I can easily swap any Fruit, Vegetable, or Protein for any other that I see, and still come home with the right amount of food for the week.

Skill ➡️ Practice ➡️ Action

There are 9 fundamental ‘Level One Nutrition Skills’. Each week I will break one down into a ‘Core Practice’, and a few ‘Possible Actions’. There is always some fluidity to this process.

Skill: Plan, Prioritize, & Prepare.

Today’s topic could also fall into the buckets of these Skills: ‘Choose Higher Quality Foods More Often’ or ‘Provide Adequate Nutrients’.

No matter how you label it, proper nutrition begins with planning and shopping.

Core Practices: Make time / Add more whole foods.

It takes time to properly plan out a shopping list full of whole foods.

If you’ve never done it before, you need to consider things such as:

• Which days will I cook?

• How many people am I cooking for?

• What do I know how to cook?

• How much room is in my fridge & freezer?

Here’s the good news:

The more you do this, the less time it takes. Eventually, there is close to zero effort required, and in fact, these positive habits become so ingrained & rewarding that you feel bad about not doing them.

Possible Actions:

• Make 5-10 minutes to organize & write out your shopping list.

• Make a template, which doesn’t have to be exactly like mine. If you’re starting from zero, don’t buy 4 of everything. Buy 1 or 2 to start.

• Take an inventory of your fridge & freezer.

• Throw away stuff that’s taking up space & that you’re never going to eat.

These are what you actually practice. Typically it’s best to pick one that you are highly confident in executing for a period of 1-2 weeks at a time, before progressing to the next one.

These are just some examples; the list of specific possible actions you could take is practically infinite. After deciding on one, in order to maintain progress, it is important to honestly measure, assess, and adjust regularly.

Newsletter subscribers: Reply ‘HELP’ to this email if you need help arriving at an Action Step, and I’ll assist!

Parting Zen 🧘‍♂️

A simple word, phrase, or thought to take with you:

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Next week I’ll talk about batch cooking, the step that comes right after shopping. See you then!

Coach Matt