College Strategies

Lesson 2: The Search for Food and Comfort: Making Friends

The “meal plan” recipe

Meal plans are tricky; usually you have a (limited) choice of what you want to eat, but from experience it usually comes down to more or less a repetitive menu on a daily basis. They also do not offer much in nutritional value. Eventually having soggy fries and pizza every day for dinner is really going to turn you off from the cheese-and-dough-combo.

Try and hit the salad bar once in a while and do not only go for high-carb-high-fat excuses for food. Still eat plenty of fresh fruits and veggies, and if they are not offered in your meal plan get them yourself. You’ll see that actual strawberries are better to snack on than the fake-strawberry-taste candy you choose to consume on a daily basis.

Fruits can actually taste good. If you were raised in an environment where you were forced to eat fruit, the sudden freedom can lead you to overcompensate and eat a lot of sweets and snacks instead. Trust me, eventually you’ll actually grow bored of it. However there is a much bigger problem than possible weight gain when it comes to college-diets. There is increased risk of high cholesterol (it is hitting more and more young people!) and heart disease. There are also proven links to decreased memory and intellectual abilities. Obviously you do not want your brain to bail on you before exams! So you have to feed your brain, nuts and fruits are healthy snacks. Also try crackers with cheese (not processed cheese-like spread!) and other toppings. Don’t think ‘oh I have to eat healthy’, because you’ll get turned off from it. Try to find stuff you like to eat that does not come out of a bag-with-salt or freezer.

Also try snacks that are less harmful; chocolate covered raisins are very chocolaty, but they are still not only that. You have to be creative, yet not starve yourself or swear off all salty/sweet snacks. It is just about not eating it all the time! Really do avoid replacing a meal with snacks. You don’t want to start that circle and if you continue on a pattern your body will not be able to make sense of it anymore. This can cause you to actually store more fats and give you indigestion and other problems. Eat three meals a day, at roughly regular times and try to sit down for them.

If you are living in a residence that has a shared kitchen seriously consider not signing up for the meal plan and cooking yourself. You could save a lot of money. Yes is it more work (you have to do groceries and prepare the meal) but you do eat what you want to eat. Specifically at which time you want to eat it. Studying until 11pm? No problem, the dining hall will be long closed and your stomach protesting the prospect of solidified grease, but you can still cook something up yourself.

Even if you get the meal plan make sure to have some easy-ready food that you can whip up in a few minutes in case you miss breakfast or dinner. You might have an evening class or something and actually not make it on a particular day of the week.

Living on a residence without a kitchen? No panic! Get a rice-cooker, a microwave or both. There are so many affordable and decent microwaveable meals available (not only talking about TV-dinners!), you’d be surprised! A rice cooker can serve for more than just cooking rice! Some very creative students make entire meals in them, and many do not involve a grain of rice. You can for example cook noodles in it, or make veggies and rice like a semi-stir fry dish. Toss in some chicken and things can get fancy.

It’s all about combining creativity with disastrous try-outs. Sure you’ll almost set your room on fire and risk you life for your next meal, but hasn’t mankind been doing that since the prehistoric era? Just make sure you have energy bars on hand in case your little experiment in the morning turns out in a burned egg and smoke alarms going off.

Meal plans are good for something though; they do provide the opportunity to find friends! Even loners can bond by just not sitting at an empty table and at some point someone is going to strike a conversation with you. It is not the sure fire way to make friends beyond dinner buddies, but it is very likely. Dinner is a time when people are sitting down instead of running around and there is usually time to chat.

Don’t bug people who are buried in a textbook too much, unless if you spot someone sporting the same text you have on your shelf. Finding people in the same course is not only a great way to find a study buddy (or at least someone to ask questions when you don’t get something right away) but you are obviously in related fields so there is a big chance you have similar interests. In other words: great friendship material.

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