It can be hard, making the decision to eat healthy foods and work on eating less refined, process, fatty and salty foods. But once the decision’s been made, the next step may prove to be even more difficult–grocery shopping for healthy food! While shopping lists change from week to week, depending on what you’re cooking, there are a few healthy essentials that are useful to keep in the pantry that you’ll probably use fairly frequently. Don’t let grocery shopping overwhelm you. Let Fit&Fab be your shopping guide with this no-fail healthy grocery list.
If grocery shopping is overwhelming to you (it is for a lot of us!), planning is key. Designate one day a week or every other week, as your shopping day. Pick a different day (or make it one giant shopping day) and make it your planning day. On the planning day, you should sort through your old favorite recipes (the healthy ones, of course), dig through recipe books and scour recipe websites and blogs to find healthy dishes that you’d like to prepare. Read through the recipes and write down everything you’ll need to purchase to create enough meals until your next shopping day.
Each week, try and select some of the foods from this healthy shopping list, and then you can rest assured that you have enough healthy ingredients to cook with.
The food listed below show some of the top nutrients found in the food, though there are still tons of other health benefits and nutrients that are too numerous to list here.
Vegetables
spinach – vitamin K, vitamin A
carrots – vitamin A
broccoli – vitamin C, vitamin K
potatoes – vitamin C, vitamin B6
avocado – vitamin K, dietary fiber, potassium
cauliflower – vitamin C
garlic – manganese
Fruit
berries – vitamin C, manganese, dietary fiber
apples – vitamin B6, vitamin C
bananas – vitamin B6, vitamin C
orange – vitamin C
pineapple – manganese, vitamin C
grapefruit – vitamin C
Grains
brown rice – manganese, selenium
oats – manganese selenium
quinoa – manganese, selenium
whole grains – manganese, dietary fiber
Dairy
skim or 1% milk – iodoine, calcium, vitamin D
eggs – selenium, iodine, B vitamins
Meat & Seafood
salmon – vitamin d, omega-3 fatty acids
beef – protein, vitamin B12, zinc
chicken – vitamin B3, protein
turkey – protein, selenium, vitamin B3
tuna – protein, B vitamins
Legumes
black beans – folate, dietary fiber
lentils – folate, dietary fiber
garbanzo beans (chickpeas) – manganese, folate
