180 Nutrition: Eating healthy is a difficult discipline to adopt at any stage of your life. It is particularly hard when you are at college. The first reason for that is that the lifestyle of college is naturally quite unhealthy. For the average student it involves lots of meals that consist of pizza or take-out Chinese food, supplemented by carb-heavy consumption of alcohol. Consumption of alcohol can also lead to the desire to eat large amounts of food at strange times which also affects your body’s ability to metabolize. Also, a lot of the people around you will have the fast metabolisms of young people or are athletes who work out extremely hard at times of day when you don’t see them. The final reason why things can be tough when it comes to eating healthy in college is money of which it is unlikely that you have an abundance. Having a limited budget every week for food makes that dollar pizza look a lot more appealing than the $7.50 salad you could get instead. With all of this said, let’s take a look at ways that you ought to be able to eat healthy whilst on a college budget.
Do A Grocery Trip
If you’re not already doing this, it’s an absolute must. Eating out is not only more expensive it’s almost always less healthy than cooking at home. But, primarily, it’s just much more expensive. For perspective, eating out for a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, can easily cost you the same amount your weekly shop will cost. Going every week means you can develop the habit, forces you to think ahead about meals and allows you to buy into a rewards scheme or club card at your local supermarket as well, all of which is conducive to creating some far healthier eating habits at lower costs.
Know When You’re Going To Eat Unhealthily
Unhealthy eating tends to spring out of the bushes at you more than it does occupy a space on your calendar. But, the more that you are able to plan ahead in this regard, the healthier you’ll be and the more money you’ll save. Knowing that dinner on Friday night will be burritos with your friends and that Thursday lunch there’s always free pizza means you can buy less food in advance. “Being honest with yourself and accepting that college life creates moments when unhealthy eating will simply happen allows you to feel more in control of those moments and to budget around them, rather than acting like they don’t ever arise and then eating only hotdogs for three days when you had a fridge full of groceries”, says Martin Blackett, journalist at AustralianHelp and BigAssignments.
Plan Your Meals
Doing weekly meal prep is such a help in this regard. “Meal prep allows you to do several things. The first thing is that it lets you budget really efficiently, because you plan your week out meal by meal rather than guessing and buying too much or too little and having to eat out. Secondly, it makes you make healthier choices because you don’t just get fast food because you forgot to figure out what to eat for some meal”, advises Camila Shute, writer at Academic Writing Service and EliteAssignmentHelp. Meal prep can feel a bit tedious or daunting. Often, when you stop to think about what meals to make, you start to wonder what you’ve ever eaten in the past and you become extremely appreciative of your mom’s knack for churning out delicious and varied meals throughout the week at home.
Avoid Premade
Premade food, for as simple and convenient as it is, shouldn’t be your solution for meal prep. Apart from being less healthy and more processed, all premade meals cost much more than the sum of the parts, which is silly since you can make the meals yourself.
Conclusion
So, as you can see, it can be done. It won’t necessarily be simple, but it is absolutely achievable, and you can find yourself with a bit of extra cash, without the extra fat, whilst your friends are wasting $13 on a burrito that you can make at home more healthily and for half the cost.
This article is written by Chloe Bennet who is an educator at Online Assignment Help and Boom Essays services. She creates and describes useful lifehacks for students and covers topics for millennials. Chloe writes health articles for Assignment Writing portal.
