So now that you’ve built up the strength to go grocery shopping, first things first! Before you go grocery shopping plan out your meals for the week. Include meals for Sunday- Saturday You’ll need breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and leave at least one day open for leftovers. When transitioning I found Pinterest and YouTube to be extremely helpful finding vegan recipes. After finding some recipes write out the ingredients you need for each meal, this will make your grocery list easier to write. Having your meals planned out and staying on task should be much easier and you will be staying within your budget. When I go grocery shopping I usually have 2-3 stores I have to go to so I make sure I have at least 2 hours set aside to shop (of course I always have my two little helpers with me so that adds more time to the trip. For you it could be less time) I go to the market for all my fruits & veggies to get them at a cheaper price. After the market I head to the grocery store to get things I can’t buy at the market. The good thing about shopping vegan is a lot more products are bring introduced and labeled as “vegan” which makes shopping easier. Although these foods are labeled always be sure to check the ingredients and learn what words to look for. Casein also known as milk protein is commonly overlooked, also watch out for beeswax & honey, gelatin and gelatin products, Isinglass in beer and wine, lactose, whey, collagen, elastin, keratin, aspic, lard and pepsin. Of course, there are plenty more ingredients to check for and get familiar with and as you grow on your vegan journey you will become more familiar with what ingredients to watch out for. Another thing we have to be sure to look out for are PLUs or Price Look Up codes. Price look up codes are 4 to 5 digit numbers and will appear on a small sticker applied to a piece of produce. Numbers beginning with the number 4 are conventionally grown and sprayed with pesticides. Numbers that begin with the number 6 are pre cut produce. GMO & GE produce begins with an 8. To find organic produce look for numbers beginning with the number 9.

The best part about changing your lifestyle these days is all of the information and helpful apps that are available to us. When I first transitioned I had a very helpful app to refer too called “Is it vegan?” basically I could pull this app up and scan the bar code to a product in the store and it would tell me if it as vegan or not. I really liked that it would show all the ingredients and list which ones were vegan as well as the ones that weren’t. I would suggest getting this app before you head to the store just to make things a little easier. A couple of other apps I would recommend are Happy Cow, Forks over knives, Vanilla Bean and Gonutts.