What The Supermarkets Won’t Tell You…
Supermarket’s Vicious Cycle
Are you the one who enters the supermarket and buys what you always buy? Probably because you don’t know what foods would be better for you or healthier or you find it’s the ‘safe’ option. There’s so much choice in the supermarket you don’t know where to start. You may have been told you eat too much sugar and want to change the yogurts you buy for a healthier option. But what is the healthy option!? And you don’t get any wiser reading the label either, so you give up.
The supermarkets’ impact on our lifestyle is bigger than we are led to believe…
Lacking nutrients in your food?
Buying and eating certain foods will mean your sugar intake for the day can be taken up with just that one item. And you wouldn’t know. This way of eating contributes to your weight gain and lack of energy – you receive a short spike of energy and then come back down. You feel hungry again in no time at all. Ready meals, for example, have saturated fat in them (used by producers and supermarkets to increase their shelf life) which leads to a myriad of health issues, blocking what your body needs to function healthily.
I’ve been working with someone who has experienced these ‘supermarket challenges.’ Let’s call her Jane. Jane did her weekly shopping and always chose the same foods, putting the same meals on the table each week, feeling uninspired and unsure whether her family were getting the nutrients and healthy food they all needed in order to deal with their daily challenges. Her food shopping was becoming a vicious cycle which was impacting on health issues – children suffering with lack of concentration, stopped playing outside, even Sunday family trips were slowly coming to an end.
You may think that healthy eating is a problem that’s insurmountable, you don’t know where to start to help you and your family eat more healthy foods.
First step towards healthy eating
The first step would be to start jotting down your daily intake of foods and when you eat. This will help you to start seeing where some of the problem areas may lie. It may be that you are eating too many of the same foods or not enough of another food group. For example, not enough leafy greens, which give essential vitamins. Once you start a food diary you can start to get an understanding of which healthy food to look for in the supermarket and fill those all-important gaps in your diet.