Preparing for the Challenge - Shopping/parsing

Grocery shopping while trying to be healthy is always easy, you just avoid 95% of the super-market and stay on the fringes.  It's the fringes where vitamins and protein hide.  Occasionally you may have to venture into the aisles to grab some almonds or cashews (which taste WAY better in my opinion).  As you venture through the more rural areas of the supermarket you will start to get concerned about some of the prices but fret not as this fear will subside once you begin parsing the food into service sizes (listed below). 

In addition to the fresh veggies, fruits, and meats; Karen and I also purchased some fish oil pills to keep my heart and our joints healthy.  If you go back to the rules of the challenge, this will limit any point losses I may incur. 

Grand total for the shopping tip: ~$140 for the entire week of food (some food will be frozen and last more than 1 week) plus a 2 months supply of fish oil pills for 2 people.  Break this into cost per meal, assuming 5 meals a day, and you get ~$2 per meal.  Take away the fish oil and it is much less than $2 a meal (on average).  Compare that to ANY fast food or meal from the middle of the store and you will find that buying healthy food is MUCH cheaper than purchasing a meal.  Of course the prep time will be more....

The Prep

Iron chef's have nothing on my wife when it comes to cutting fruits and vegetables into proper serving sizes. Vegetables are measured, weighed, cut, and bagged in record time.  There was a time commitment to prepping all of the food, we spent something on the order of an hour in the kitchen setting everything up and planning our meals for the week.  Although this was a MAJOR pain in the behind, I don't have to think about it the rest of the week. 

Examples of some of the prep:

putting grapes into 1 cup servings and bagging

Cutting strawberries and bagging into 1 cup servings

Parsing a cantaloupe into 1/4 melon servings and bagging

chicken into 5oz serving sizes and bagging

etc.  .....

Finally we ended up with a fridge that looked like this:

This was half way through the process...it ended up much more full.

Below you can see how we broke out the food into blocks.  Some of the baggies are in 2 block portions because that is what we planned to eat to get to our required blocks.  

Courtesy of CrossFit 610

If you have any tips on making this process go faster it would be appreciated.  Tomorrow begins the challenge, time to get 8 hours of sleep!