A Guide to Grocery Shopping & Meal Planning - Coping with the threat of scarcity

During this time of uncertainty amongst the COVID-19 outbreak, our usual approach to shopping and preparing food might get flipped on its head, which can add to the stress and anxiety of an already overwhelming situation, particularly if you struggle with your relationship to food. At LCIE we understand that even the threat of food scarcity can leave us feeling restricted and deprived, triggering the forbidden fruit effect around food, leaving us with a sense of being out of control, or making us feeling guilty for enjoying food. It can be difficult to plan and prepare meals with this looming over us, and even more so when we don't know what we're walking into in the grocery store. 

We wanted to create a resource that helps us make the most of a tricky situation, giving you some supportive structure to use as a guide for shopping and menu planning, but with flexibility depending on what's accessible to you. We realise that you might not be able to get ahold of your usual staples, fresh foods, and things diet culture teaches us we 'should' eat - this guide is designed to help you navigate food with flexibility and self-compassion while also taking the pressure off of you to be a 'perfect' eater. 

This guide includes: 

- A step-by-step approach to navigating the grocery store 

- A flexible shopping list 

- How to create nourishing, balanced, satisfying meals from a hodge podge of ingredients

- Advice on dealing with the threat of food scarcity

- Ideas for self care

- A template to help you plan your meals and snacks

- An example grocery store haul and how to put it together

We appreciate that these are challenging times financially for folks so have made this resource free to download. We also ask you to hold in mind that we too are a small business facing the uncertainty of the pandemic. If you value our work, and have the means to do so, we'd really appreciate it if you could chuck us a fiver or whatever you can to help us continue to fight diet culture and bring you more resources like this.