Cooking Tips for Students
Eating Healthy on a Budget?
Ready-to-use sauces, pesto, tuna cans, frozen foods, and pizza. If you’re a student living away from home, you surely know how hard it is to resist the temptation of filling your shopping cart with this stuff. But are they really that bad for your health?
Whatever you might have heard about them, these products should not be demonized. The thing is, without a balanced diet, any food item, including the super healthy ones, can be dangerous. It is important, therefore, to strike a happy medium between trying to make ends meet (especially if you’re a student studying abroad) and living a healthy lifestyle.
We have come up with some useful tips that will help you do just that.
Focus on the Big Picture
First of all, it is important to see the situation from multiple perspectives. What does the student who has to do without their family’s healthy dishes eat? The obvious answer would be pasta. Lots of it, actually. After all, you do not need a degree to make yourself some macaroni, do you? And the best thing is that it takes very little time. After a hard day of study, it is difficult to get yourself to hang around the stove. All you want to do is tame your hunger. Pasta is, therefore, your number one choice.
However, if you overdo it, you risk doing a big disservice to your body. Ready-to-use sauces and tuna tins are cheap and available in almost all supermarkets. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, are not frequent guests in young people’s refrigerators, and this is certainly not good for their health. Why do they opt for frozen foods? The answer is obvious: because they’re easier to prepare. Pizza is on the menu of most university students two or three days a week. And let’s not forget about street food, such as kebabs and hotdogs.
Avoid Common Mistakes When Doing Grocery Shopping
It takes very little to avoid mistakes during your grocery shopping tours. For example, buying pizza, fries, and cola from a small nearby store may cost you a fortune in the long run. Why? Because it won’t last you long.
Therefore, you’ll need to focus on food products that will meet your nutritional needs for at least seven days. Perhaps, you should come up with a shopping list, so you can remember everything you want.
Take advantage of special offers, especially if they’re on products with long shelf life. Of course, you cannot always purchase legumes, fruit, and vegetables. However, you can still buy some lentils or broccoli and treat yourself to a nice dish a couple of times a week. It doesn’t take much, and your body will surely thank you for it by functioning properly.
Save Money
Whenever there’s a sale at a nearby supermarket, you should stock up on food. Thanks to that, you can afford yourself the luxury of returning home with expensive products that you usually only dream about.
Think if you really need to use the services of that online paper editor for your school assignment. Maybe it’s better to spend that money on things you actually need to lead a healthy lifestyle.
To save the environment and produce less waste, you can consider drinking tap water. And if you are worried about its quality, you can use filters that can improve its quality. Of course, you’ll have to change filters frequently, but it’ll definitely be much cheaper than buying bottled water. Also, you can save money by avoiding having snacks or sandwiches for lunch. Even a salad prepared at home would be a much better idea.
Avoid Buying Food That is Near “Best Before” Date
Avoid buying products that will soon expire. If you’ve bought some vegetables, you should freeze them for the next few days.
By cutting a few corners and using common sense, you can still eat healthy, even if you are a student living far away from home.
