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Written by Ken Bauer
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This is the one thing that takes
students by surprise more than anything. It is most visible in what we
refer to as “the freshman 15” or “the freshman 5” if you are lucky.
This is the visible 5 – 15 pounds that most freshmen gain during their
first year of school, but it doesn’t stop there.
Once you are at college you are solely responsible for creating your
own diet. For the next few years you will develop your eating habits
for the first time completely on your own. Let's try to really
understand the situation.
For most of a student’s life there existed some sort of parental
guidance regarding dining although the amount of guidance fluctuates by
family practice. Whether a concerned parent made meals and kept close
watch of everything eaten (we should all be so lucky) or just did most
of the grocery shopping and then the student made their own meals, both
of these scenarios involve parental oversight. So once at school this
is completely gone and the student finds themselves without a realistic
dietary plan or realistic experience of making all of their eating
decisions.
There are two ways to go once at school and those are dining plan or
feed your self. But note that even most dining plans require that you
feed yourself once or twice a day and fill in a few blanks yourself.
The Meal Plan
Most colleges have gotten wise and now require that you purchase a
dining plan during your first year or two. This is because it is hard
to do effective studying while starving or hearing your roommate beg
for food. A meal plan allows students only one to three meals per day.
The student can’t go off and spend 100 meals by buying dinner for
everyone on their floor only to find his or herself soon after with no
meals left. Meal plans simply don’t work that way. Meal plans ensure
that a student will get at least something in their stomach every day.
Meal plans are seen by many as an expensive requirement that colleges
impose on their students in order to make money. This is an undeserved
reputation as meal plans are an attempt to keep students fed over an
entire semester and protect students from making some really bad
choices that they inevitably would those first years at college.
Buying Your Food
So it is time to come to terms with what your parents have been dealing
with for years and that is the fact that, “Good groceries aren’t free!”
After a few years at school and buying your own groceries you may
realize some of the frustration that your parents were dealing with
when you would let a dozen friends raid the family refrigerator. But
enough preaching, right now we need to quickly show you what we found
about realistically getting this “food thing” down to a science.
We’ve been saying it constantly throughout this guide but why let that
stop us from saying it again, “get a mini-fridge and, a mini freezer.”
You need them. They will save you money. If you can’t get them new then
try to get them used and do it as soon as possible.
For right now we will try to get the basics down for you. Let’s be
realistic, the quicker something can be fixed with the least amount of
effort involved, the better it is. Remember to think about your health
first and foremost. Just because something is quick and easy doesn’t
mean it needs to be bland or unhealthy.
On the quick and easy list we’ll start with QUALITY frozen stuff from
your local grocery store. Understand what we just said, "grocery
store." We didn't say anything about a convenience store or gas
station. Cost efficiency is your main priority here and cost efficiency
doesn’t mean buying the cheapest food. It means that if you buy
something that has three or four servings then you eat all of them.
What good is it to buy the cheap $6 lasagna instead of the really good
$8 lasagna if you eat 30 percent of it and give the rest away or let it
go bad. You would be better off buying the $8 lasagna and properly
storing the leftovers and actually eating them. Do not give all your
food away or tolerate someone else taking it. Do not wrap leftovers up
in a paper napkin and leave them in the refrigerator so that in a day
or two they are disgusting little dried out things.
Learn how to store stuff. You should have resealable freezer, not
sandwich or storage, bags for storing food both in the freezer and the
refrigerator. Really cheap (really cheap) sealable airtight storage
containers have become available at Wal Mart, Kmart, Target, Meijer,
etc. over the last two years so there is no reason to not have an ample
supply. This is the key to cost efficiency. The number two waste of
money we at CollegeCodex.com observe in college students is not the
buying of expensive frozen and refrigerated food but the non-use of
leftovers (#1 is paying too much for rent ‘see the off-campus living
guide’).
So next on the quick and easy list are refrigerated foods. If you don’t
have a freezer available then you can buy refrigerated foods for easy
making in the microwave, or oven if available. The problem is that
refrigerated foods generally don’t keep for long periods of time like
frozen foods. Still though, they can be cheaper and much better for you
than fast food depending on what you buy.
Sometimes when at the grocery store and browsing through the foods you
will notice that some of the higher quality foods are just as expensive
as fast food. However, fast food is gravely unhealthy. For the price of
fast food you can buy really healthy and absolutely delicious pre made
foods that you will have on hand in your refrigerator whenever you want
it. Buy whatever fruits and vegetables you want but be sure to keep
them in the freezer bags. Remember to get your grain intake as well.
For solid advice on a personal and healthy eating routine just for you
visit the new & excellent web site the Department of Agriculture
has designed @ www.mypyramid.gov/mypyramid/index.aspx
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