How to plan your food shopping list

I can safely say from experience that walking into a supermarket without a list of food and winging it, one of two things will likely happen:

1) You wander aimlessly up and down the aisles buying too much food, end up binning a lot along with throwing in too many chocolate bars whilst making questionable DVD purchases (or maybe that's just me)

2) You don't buy enough food or forget something and end up getting out the takeaway menu and ordering with hungry eyes that are about 3 times too big for your stomach

Neither is great if you're looking to get in better shape / save your money and time.
This is why I wanted to do a quick post on how I like to build my shopping list and give some tips so you don't waste your time and money in the supermarkets.

1) Grab some paper

2) Make 7 columns for the next 7 days, labelled Mon - Sun

3) Down the side, split this into how many meals you have each day

4) Plan out what foods you need for each meal and in what quantity

5) Run through that list and add the ingredients to your shopping list.

6) Where you already have an item on the list, increase the quantity. i.e. if I have two different meals with 3 eggs in, I'd write 6 eggs rather than write eggs out twice

Keep that shopping list with you when you next go food shopping and stick to it!

Bonus tips:

After a while, you get to know the general lay out of the supermarket so put your shopping list in the general order that you walk around the store. It saves time so you don’t get to the far end of the store; look at your list and realise you’ve missed something from aisle 2.

If you pretty much have the same meals from week to week, keep your previous shopping list and you can easily use that again which saves having to draw out the weekly planner again.

If certain foods are cheaper in bulk i.e. beef, chicken etc and you know you will be eating it again then bulk buy and freeze what you don't need right now.

Try to plan meals that will help you to use up all the food to reduce wastage. i.e. if you buy a whole head of brocolli but only need so much for 1 meal, try to plan another meal with brocolli in so it is used up.

Check what you already have in your cupboards / fridge / freezer so you don’t needlessly buy something you already have.

There you have it - quick, simple, time saving, cost saving, waist saving.