Maggie Griffin: Setting Realistic Goals
One-on-One: Supermarket Nutritionist
from our newsletter, broadcast on
Monday November 26, 2007
Monday November 26, 2007
Have you ever set a goal and later found it was impossible to reach? I’m sure it was a mighty discouraging feeling to realize that your efforts weren't going to pay off. The next time, you may have thought twice before trying a new project. If you'd made your goal more attainable, though, you may have succeeded – and that may have encouraged you to keep raising the bar a bit higher.
We can help our shoppers do the same thing. Rather than focusing on a difficult, long-term goal, we can help our customers take small steps towards success. With each triumph, their self-confidence will grow. So will their chances of even bigger achievements. When changes take place in small doses, they're much easier to assimilate into life.
Good nutrition isn't an all-or-nothing thing. It's a siding scale, and no matter where you sit on that scale, you can always do something to be a little bit healthier. If a shopper currently loves heavy cream in their coffee, switching to half-and-half is a small step towards better eating. Once they're happy with that change, and proud of the success, they can raise the bar just a bit to two percent milk – and then on to skim. Challenge that coffee drinker to switch from heavy cream to skim milk overnight, however, and she very well may fail.
Most of Brookshire’s customers live in the rural south, and they come to our stores with long-held cultural traditions of delicious southern comfort foods. Trans fats and triglycerides are foreign terms, and change comes hard to these hard-working, food-loving folks. We’ve had great success in suggesting small changes – a low-fat banana pudding, or a reduced-calorie seafood gumbo – that allow shoppers to eat a bit healthier but still keep their familiar foods.
Familiar foods are central at holiday time, too. Now that we’re smack in the middle of the holiday season, our shoppers are facing some even tougher choices. To get through this tricky time, we encourage shoppers to keep the non-negotiables – foods that define the holidays – while experimenting with just-a-bit healthier side dishes.
For example, if a deep-fried turkey is a Thanksgiving essential, that’s fine with us, but maybe we can make the oyster dressing with low-fat cornbread, and the green bean casserole with 99% fat-free mushroom soup. A tofu-cream pie may be pushing it, but a fresh fruit and sugar-free gelatin dessert would be an acceptable and tasty substitution for some heavier fare.
Excess is the word of the day at Christmastime. Whenever possible, we encourage our shoppers to de-stress by simplifying their holiday meals. We suggest taking advantage of store-prepared goodies, and we offer recipes for quicker, easier and healthier choices. Our recipes focus on preparing foods in advance, with convenient ingredients, and with reduced-fat and calorie products. What really matters, we emphasize, is friends and family gathering together.
Remember that all successes are celebrations – whether it's switching from heavy cream to half-and-half, or losing one pound, or trying reduced-fat potato chips. Celebrate this commitment to improving nutrition with your shoppers. And most importantly, resist the temptation to lecture and demonstrate your respect for their choices. They may be very different from the ones we would make – and that’s okay.
Maggie Griffin is the Consumer Nutrition Specialist for Brookshire Grocery Company, a 155-store chain in the southwestern U.S., based in Tyler, Texas. Griffin’s shoppers are struggling with the clash of long-held cultural cooking with new nutritional findings. Griffin works to make slow changes through education and the setting of attainable goals.
As a nutritionist working for a supermarket, you have a unique outlook on how retailers are increasing health awareness at the store level and the kind of questions that shoppers ask. Each month, we'll be featuring a guest column, written by a nutritionist, that communicates this point of view on a variety of topics. And we want to hear from you. If you are a supermarket nutritionist interested in sharing your perspective and insights, we would love to help you share your thoughts! Please contact Allison Bloom at allison@foodnutritionscience.com.
