When going to university some people will worry about continuing to eat healthily and some will not care. I do care about how I eat. Eating foods which are bad for us is so easy to do when you have limited time and there isn’t someone else there to cook for you.
There are a few things I have found help me to stay healthy here at university. First a little planning goes a long way. The planning starts before you leave to go shopping! Planning my meals before I shop so I know what I need and making sure there is plenty of the healthy stuff on my list. I still buy some bits and pieces which are not as healthy as I would like but it happens.
Another thing which helps to eat healthily is to enjoy the food that you are making. For example, I hate peppers so I don’t try to eat them just because they are healthy. I will choose other fruit and vegetables instead which I prefer. I am to have at least one portion of vegetables with every meal but I still have things like macaroni cheese when I feel like it. Someone once told me ‘a little bit of what you fancy’ and I think this is great advice because as soon as you say ‘I won’t eat that’ it becomes the only thing you want all day every day.
Learning to cook lots of different foods is also an essential. We all know that the really healthy stuff does not come out of the microwave or in the form of noodles. These things are lovely and can be eaten but should not be all that is had. Learning how to cook some vegetables or some meals with vegetables in it will really help at university. One meal that I like to make is Lasagne.
My lasagne is different to most peoples because I am a vegetarian and I am allergic to tomato so I use Quorn and gravy instead. But other than that, I just chuck in loads of different vegetables that I like such as carrots, onion, courgette, mushrooms and baby corn. Not only is this a super filling meal, which means less snacking in the evenings, but it also has so much goodness in it. I do fry mine so I could be even heathier if I boiled it but I prefer the taste when I fry it. Stir-fry is another great meal where you can pretty much put in whatever you fancy. I do a vegetable noodle stir-fry which uses dried plain noodles which don’t have all the salt which pot noodles contain.
In terms of having fruit, a few weeks after I came to university I invested in a smoothie maker which makes having fruit a lot easier and a lot more fun. I used to have smoothies at home and always found that I could eat far more quantity and variation of fruit when it was in a smoothie than when eating it as it is. In smoothies I have blackberries, raspberries, grapes, bananas, strawberries, blueberries and any other fruit I fancy. In their raw form I only eat grapes and bananas and strawberries if they are in season.
Being at university shouldn’t have to stop you eating healthily but eating healthily shouldn’t stop you enjoying a treat now and then. Just take a bit of time to look at different recipes, I find YouTube really good for searching for meals containing certain ingredients.
