Most times, people don’t choose to eat healthy options because they take time and energy to prepare. When you’re hungry, you want to eat now! The key to meeting in the middle is preparing healthy food for yourself in advance, so when you’re hungry, the healthy food is already available to you. When you’re in college, often times this is the first time you’ve been one hundred percent in control of what you eat, and the eating habits you develop now will carry into your life after college.
The biggest time consumer is washing and chopping vegetables for meals or salads. But nowadays, even at Walmart, vegetables are available to buy frozen, pre-washed, and pre-cut. Even if you’re not a fan of raw vegetables, there are frozen bags of veggies that you can pop in the microwave and they will steam themselves. Adding some vegetables on the side to a baked potato or some rice is not only a healthy option, but easy, and is less expensive than a frozen pizza or chicken nuggets.
Frozen vegetables are also really easy to add to a dish. If I don’t have the time to individually select, wash and chop peppers and onions, I can actually buy a frozen mix of them to add to rice or pasta that gives it a lot of flavor. Adding onions and garlic to your meals are often the key to keeping them from being bland, so having them on hand to cook with without having to do a lot of prep is really helpful.
I used to not be a big fan of salads, but once I started making them for myself, I actually started to enjoy having fresh salads to eat whenever I wanted, as well as some time in the kitchen with some music. When you make them for yourself, you’re in control of adding whatever you like and leaving out what you don’t. When my mom used to make salads for our family, she’d add whatever she liked or had on hand, which would influence how much of it I’d eat as a kid. Finding a salad dressing that you really like is also a plus- I’ve discovered that non-dairy ranch dressings actually have way more flavor than the regular- who knew?
Canned vegetables that are pre-prepared aren’t quite as healthy as some others, but are a really cheap option to keep vegetables around if you don’t have a ton of freezer space or are afraid of letting fresh produce go bad. Green beans, corn, tomatoes and other vegetables are easy to add to some pasta, potatoes or rice, which are all cheap and easy-to-prepare meal bases. You don’t have to know how to cook Mom’s homemade lasagna to have a non-junk food meal.
If you eat meat, buying frozen chicken breasts or ground beef to add to a Crock-Pot meal is much cheaper than buying nuggets or burgers. Plus, making a meal for yourself isn’t only cheaper, it produces way more food than a frozen microwave meal, and you can produce several days of leftovers from one day of cooking.
I’ve found that I get a sense of accomplishment from cooking for myself, and I have more energy throughout the day from not eating junk all the time. If I just invest an hour or two a week to cooking a big meal in advance, I can spare myself a trip to a drive-thru and wasting five dollars on one meal.