First things first, the ingredients, the building blocks to your weekly masterpiece.

Grocery shopping can be mindless or it can be mind boggling, either one is generally an unwanted approach. Mindful shopping will not only bring awareness to the kinds of food you are buying but also what you are feeding yourself and any other people.

Grocery shopping should be done with easy, without fret and with a plan in mind. If approached with a list in hand, it’s so much easier to complete without getting home and realizing you forgot a small but crucial part of a recipe.

The recipe gallery within Meal Garden is vast and plentiful, many of which are created by nutritionists with eating healthily top of mind. The various bundles that are offered are one of the easiest ways to collect recipes that work well together or are from the same theme.

For example, the healthy eating bundle has mini-collections based on your diet or simply what you feel like that week! Under the Paleo mini-collection, there is a whole host of recipes categorized for each search.

Simply add the recipe you find most intriguing or most drool-inducing to your cookbook for organizing later OR you can add it directly to your week’s menu plan by clicking on “Schedule”.

Here’s a pro tip: when you are scheduling the recipe and you want to plan it for multiple days of the week (because I’m not about to make a different lunch every day of the week), you simply click on one of the days you want to have it and click on the “Plan Leftovers” button right underneath Done. Then click on the meals, breakfast, lunch or dinner that you would like to have the meal again. Easy-peasy, right?

5 Ingredient Paleo Pancakes (because… well, pancakes!)

Now that you have all your delicious meals inserted into your week’s menu plan, scroll below and you will find your grocery list, nicely prepared and ready to take with you to the grocery store! Easy as that.

You can print it or email it to yourself or whoever is grabbing the groceries and you are off to the store with the exact amount of ingredients you need for each recipe.

Navigating the grocery store is straightforward when you understand how it works. When we go grocery shopping, we want to stay along the outside of the store.

Have you ever noticed how all the products are on the outer edges of the grocery store and much of the refrigerated items are at the back? Grocery stores are often staged the same way.

Keep to the peripherals of the grocery store where most of the whole and natural foods are kept. The deeper you go within the aisles, the more you will discover the processed and refined packaged food products.

We will cover the nutritional content of foods and why we should always choose foods that do not require a label in the third part of the series.

When there is no list, stay on the outskirts.

With your weekly menu grocery list in hand, the task of grocery shopping is a breeze. The perimeters are most likely where you will stay for most of the shopping, aside from a few dips in to get some pantry necessities.

Once all your goodies are in the cart, there you have it! Grocery store navigation made simple.

Stay tuned and look for next week’s installment, part two will dive into how the meal planning puzzle works!

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Meal Planning Made Easy

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