Healthy Eating as a Student

Healthy eating is a chore. Its not an easy thing to fit into your life, especially when you’re a student who lives off of either tinned or takeaway food. It’s also hard to keep a routine of daily meal times, when timetables are always changing and you’re never awake for breakfast, or you stay up and have an extra dinner at 3am. 

I am not the type of person who preaches healthy living, as I am so bad at keeping up with it myself. My idea of healthy eating is smothering strawberries in Nutella, but at least I’m trying! It is something that I always feel guilty about, but as a student it is so much effort. I can never find the motivation to make myself food that takes more than 15 minutes to cook, resulting in pasta being my main food source. Trying to challenge myself and make extravagant meals is way to much hassle when it is just for one person. I live off mainly one-pot dishes just because washing up is such a chore on your own. Also fruit and veg is expensive and goes off too quickly because you end up having to bulk buy things to get them cheaper. So cookies and crisps are usually a cheaper and quicker alternative.

There are a few little suggestions I can give to struggling students like myself. I try to add veg into as many meals as I can. Even though all I cook is pasta, I try to add peppers or onions or tomatoes, so there is still no more washing up as you can just chuck everything into one pot. To stop myself from munching on rubbish snacks I just force myself to not buy them, as well as trying to have proper meals at decent times so I don’t snack in between. Another thing I like to do is have dinner with my friends. Me and a couple of my friends at university will sometimes get together and cook for each other. That way you can make more elaborate meals and it won’t be so tedious because you’re with your friends.

Something I have gotten into recently is fruit smoothies. You can buy blenders cheap, for as little as £20, and make tasty smoothies as an alternative to snacking on chocolate like I usually do. All you need is a mixture of chopped frozen fruit, which you can buy ready made, or can make little bags of yourself; some fruit juice; frozen yogurt and milk. This is a student budget way to add some healthy food into your diet.

Like I said, I am not the person to be preachy healthy eating, but I know there are other students like me, who struggle with this as well, so these are just some of the things I try to do and have found really successful. Happy eating!