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We are all looking for ways to make student meals cheap. We don’t want to pay too much money, but if you want to stay healthy, then a small budget will need to be stretched to the limit. This article offers information on the sorts of foods you should be eating and then goes on to how you can do it all on a budget.
The Nutrients You Need
This is a really tricky one because your body needs a wide variety of macro and micronutrients. Listing them all in this article wouldn’t offer much help since you would have to research each and every nutrient to find the ones you need. It takes time, so you can delegate your dissertation to https://thesisgeek.com/write-my-dissertation.php and take care of your health.
To try and offer a little help, here are the foods you can buy to ensure you have a full quota of all the micro and macronutrients you need.
+ Chicken or Whole Wheat Bread and Chickpeas
+ Red Meat or Egg and Cheese and Yogurt and Lentils and Mushrooms
+ Rapeseed oil
+ Sesame seed oil
+ Beans
+ Black pepper
+ Tomato paste
+ Almonds
+ Flax seeds
+ Turmeric
+ Walnuts – Whole Earth 3 Nut Butter Peanut, Pecan & Walnut
+ Onion
+ Garlic
+ Broccoli
+ Egg
+ Cabbage or spinach
+ Avocado
+ Salmon (or vegan Omega 3 oils)
+ Yogurt
+ Banana
+ Apple
+ Lemon juice
+ Blueberries
So, let’s address the elephant in the room and consider how you are supposed to fit all those foods into a week, not to mention how you are supposed to afford those foods. Not to mention the fact that being a vegetarian means you need to eat even more foods to make up for the nutrients you are not getting from meat. Well, this explains how super-rich celebrities like Johnny Depp are able to abuse alcohol for decades and still look great. They can afford to eat all the nutrients their bodies needs.
The upside for you is that you don’t need many of these nutrients in your diet. You can find ways to mix and match them, and you can find ways to make your micro meals and freeze them. For example, the last part of the list is separate because there is nothing stopping you from buying small yogurts, and throwing a little lemon juice in there, a little banana one day, a little apple the next, and so forth. Freezing the things you don’t use, so you can use them another day.
The Vegetarian Problem
Let’s say you want your student-budget meals without eating meat. In that case, you are going to have to eat more, but on the plus side, you can do it cleverly to pay less over the long term.
Look at it this way. If you want to avoid the poor abused chicken, then you need to fit things like Whole Wheat Bread and you need Chickpeas into your diet. However, where the chicken can be expensive, especially the ethical stuff, things like chickpeas are very cheap and can be stored without refrigeration for years. You can throw in a handful of chickpeas into a single meal per year, and you are getting what you need (so long as you are not an athlete or bodybuilder). You will also need whole wheat bread, but you can freeze a loaf of the stuff and have six slices per week, perhaps with three sandwiches at some point in the week. Overall, it may turn out far less expensive than having to buy chicken on a weekly basis.
Buying salmon is expensive, but there are amazing Omega 3 oil pills you can take twice per week. There are vegan ones that will cost you a fraction of the cost of salmon.
Replacing the benefits of red meat is tricky, but only on the surface. Instead of red meat, you have to find a way to eat all these things per week: Egg, Cheese, Yogurt, Lentils, and Mushrooms. Yet, lentils are very easy to store without refrigeration, and they are cheap to buy. You can buy bags of sliced mushrooms that you can freeze, and just defrost a handful for one meal per week. As for cheese, egg, and yogurt, they are pretty much the most versatile foods on this list. They can go in loads of meals, you would probably end up eating them each week by accident if you had never seen this list.
The Saving Grace of The Student Food Budget
What if you don’t get all of these foods into your diet in the same week? Well, you will be happy to learn that you can live without them for quite a while. In fact, talk to your parents about the really good-looking people who grew up to become middle-aged Uggos! Some of them lost their looks because of alcohol and drugs, but some of them look rough and out of shape because they went years missing parts of their diet.
On a similar note, have you seen pictures of people before they were rich? They have a pot belly or rings under their eyelids, frizzy hair, or a long list of other things that make them look less than perfect. This is because they went from an unbalanced diet to a varied one, and they became healthy.
If you didn’t get any garlic in this week’s meals, or you couldn’t find a way to get the nuts in your diet this week, then don’t worry too much. There are some elements that you can live without for a few weeks simply because your body doesn’t need that much of them. Plus, there is a good chance that some of your other meals also provided the nutrients you needed. The raisins you ate, the celery, the single cream, the cherries on a tart, they may too have added the nutrients you needed.
There is also the fact that some of these foods are doing some serious heavy lifting when compared to the others. There are things in broccoli that even scientists can’t figure out because they seem to have a bigger nutritional effect on some people rather than others. For some reason, things like avocado and blueberries are superfoods with them having up to twenty nutrients and a variety of fats that actually tricks your body into using more of its stored fat.
All in all, it may seem like the list of ingredients are very pricey, but in reality, they are achievable weekly foods if you are smart about it. Arrange your diet this way, and it will fit your student food budget while helping to keep you healthy.