Genius Hour Post #1

Hello Readers!
                This is my first official post for Genius Hour so far. I thought today I would share some tips that I am just learning now and some tips that you may have heard before from your mother that are actually quite helpful!
                When embarking on a journey like this, the most logical place to start is grocery shopping. This is an important task that can either make or break your eating choices for the next week or two. Therefore, I think it’s very important to strategize and really think it through before you hit the shelves to stock up for the week.

I-5 Design and Manufacture. (2011, August 19) Grocery Store Design(Online Image). Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/i5design/6075050600



                A great piece of advice that I have heard time and time again and learned from the hard way is planning ahead before grocery shopping. Taking the time to make a list of what you intend to buy before going into the store has a lot of benefits aside from making your shopping trip speedy. One of these important benefits is saving you some money! This happens in a couple of ways. One of which being that you limit your amount of impulse buys! When you consider how often these impulse buys end up being foods that are unhealthy for you, this step is more than worth it. When you don’t have a list of foods you intend to buy, you are more likely to aimlessly roam the aisles to let the foods you need pop out at you. If you plan ahead, you can purposefully choose which aisles you go down. For myself, this stops me from going down the ever so tempting snack aisle! By avoiding the chips, cookies, and all of other processed snacks, you are way less likely to buy them. In my experience, keeping these items out of your house is the best way to avoid overindulging in them: Out of sight, out of mind! However, if you do choose to buy some of these types of food, the next best thing you can do is make sure you store it somewhere that’s out of your direct sight. The same principle applies here: if you aren’t looking at it every time you walk into your kitchen, you will not indulge in them nearly as much.

                Another reason that planning ahead can save you some money is that it gives you an opportunity to check out the sales that are happening in your local grocery stores and shop accordingly. If you get flyers sent to where you live, take the time to look through them and see the deals that they have going on, and base your list off of these weekly discounts. Alternatively, a great 21^st century tool I have grown to love and appreciate is an app called Flipp! This app holds just about every flyer you could ever want, grocery related and beyond! You can search flyers based on your current location, a particular store, or even a particular grocery item. Being able to search a particular food item is very useful for those more pricey purchases so you can see if any stores in your area are having a sale for that item and compare prices. Also, if all of these perks wasn’t enough, you can actually create a virtual shopping list on this app by “clipping” ads, and gain access to coupons to use for additional savings! You can have all these awesome features for free to use at the convenience of any phone app. I can honestly say that this one has been a game changer!
                If I can impart one more piece of advice to my fellow students facing the struggle of eating well, it will be this. Do not, and I repeat, do NOT go grocery shopping when you are hungry! Even if you can just have a snack before you head out, do it! Going into the grocery store when you are hungry is going to increase your impulse buys so much! The only potential exception to this rule is if you are going to visit Costco and binge on their samples!