As part of the weight loss challenge, the head trainer at the gym, Will have us a grocery store tour at our local Trader Joe’s. This was pretty sweet, a real life “eat this, not that” type of thing with a person there to answer all of my questions.

Some real interesting tid bits I learned from this:

– Read the labels, this seems obvious, but as someone that works in marketing it’s very believable to see how deceiving the front of any packaging can be. You have to put in the foot work, read exactly how much is in everything. It takes time, but it really is worth it, it’s insane how much salt, sugar, and fat is added to pretty much EVERYTHING.

– It’s also about quality. While looking at the number portion is important, also look at the ingredients. My overall goal is to become healthy in each way, so it’s really about the quality of the food I eat and not just quantity and calories. Just like above with everything else, it’s amazing how many chemicals and preservatives are added to everything.

– On that note…for snacks, I’ve stopped eating the individual fruit at the bottom of the cup greek yogurt. Because there’s a ton of chemicals added to keep it fresh and preventing it from mixing with the rest of the yogurt, for presentation purposes! For pretty much the same cost, I can buy a tub of greek yogurt, a package of fruit and add it myself, and now I’m not eating fruit flavored chemicals at the same price!

He gave a lot of little nutritional tips that will really help me out and take my game up and get me back on a larger losing trail. Time to completely redo my grocery list and rethink what I’m going to cook in the next few weeks!