Living the college lifestyle it is extremely easy to become accustomed to the frozen pizza and ramen diet. It’s cheap, easy, convenient, and serves its purpose. However, the purpose it is not serving is fueling your body with what it needs to power it through your day. Eating healthier does not mean restricting yourself to only eating leafy greens and plain chicken. Eating healthy is finding ways to better your diet while still enjoying your normal “fun” foods.

To dive in let’s look at 7 tips you can utilize to help you create healthier, realistic, and purposeful eating habits to give your body what it needs!

Tip 1: Establish your “absolutely not’s”

While it may sound crazy to think of what foods you refuse to eat, this is a realistic part of your diet plan! Discovering what you refuse to eat or maybe can’t for dietary restrictions very much sway what meals you will plan on making. A simple way to discover this is to lay out a list of the top 5 things you can’t stand to eat.

Tip 2: Find healthy ingredients you enjoy!

Similar to tip one instead of finding foods you hate, find healthy ingredients you enjoy! This will help you once again drive you to quicker and better results for discovering what healthy foods you can make! A great place to start is by looking at what vegetables and fruits you enjoy. These are often staples for many dishes and can help you tailor your meals around them!

Tip 3: Be willing to try something new

The best part about cooking at college is often times we are cooking for one. This is great because no matter how bad it is you’re the only one who’s eating it! If you are someone like myself who loves cooking for others but is always worried it could come out bad the first time around, make it for yourself and see what happens! Be willing to expand your horizons, one way I like to try something new is every Sunday I make a meal I’ve never made before to not only help me find new healthy foods I enjoy but enhance my cooking skills!

Tip 4: Set a plan

By setting a plan I don’t mean you need to layout all meals weeks ahead. While meal prepping is something I’m a huge proponent of, it’s understandable to see why someone wouldn’t want to do this. Instead, I’m proposing simply thinking of the styles of meals you will want to make over the week. By looking in our pantry it’s good to see what we already have as this saves us time later in the week but also money from making fewer trips to the grocery store!

Tip 5: Find Recipe Sources

Finding a consistent place to find recipes can make or break your healthy cooking habits. Two sources I love to use are the Tasty App and Tik Tok. These work out awesome since they feature the video of how to make the meal along with all the needed ingredients!

Tip 6: Start snacking

To help optimize our metabolism and satisfy our hunger cravings most people should be eating small amounts of food every 2-3 hours of their day. Some snacks that work awesome to bring on the go are:

• Apple and peanut butter
• Grapes
• Bananas
• Protein bar
• Beef Jerky
• Trail Mix
• Mini rice cakes
• Applesauce packets

Tip 7: Remember to eat “fun” foods

Often times everyone thinks eating healthy is all about throwing out all junk food and depriving ourselves of all of the things tasty, this is the farthest thing from what eating healthy is really about. While I do recommend cutting out some junks foods by stop buying them. Make sure you still have fun foods within range. Whether this counts as you being able to go out and get food somewhere or like myself simply keeping a bag of candy next to my desk. At the end of the day, it is important to remember we are human, we can enjoy fun foods just in moderation. If you want a piece of candy, have some candy, as long as you’re not devouring the whole bag you can still be within your fitness goals.

Healthy eating is intuitive eating. There is no need to bust out a food scale and only buy certified clean organic foods. Instead, just make sure you are thinking of what you eating and try to make at least 4 days of your week healthy meal-based. One way I balance my healthy eating lifestyle with my college lifestyle is by eating healthy Sunday – Thursday and then letting Friday and Saturday be days where indulge a little extra and let myself enjoy the day. By doing this we hold ourselves accountable a majority of the time but are still able to indulge and have fun without losing our progress!