Ever skip a meal? Well, yeah, I’m sure you have, but have you ever kept skipping meals?
College students have everything given to us (granted at a big cost), but when it comes to eating we can just walk over to the dining hall, get the food we want and start eating, or alternatively make it in our apartment or house. The problem is: we’re not.
It’s easy too. It’s not like outside of college, because if you ever get lazy and you don’t want to cook, you can just go eat at the dining hall and it’ll be made for you or you can even get some takeout on or off campus. It’s not that easy outside of college.
We have grossly expensive meal plans to go to dining halls, shops and restaurants whenever we want. We have money from our parents to spend on food, but we’re not using it.
I was sitting in my college’s dining hall doing some work where I overheard one guy talking about his friends’ eating habits. One of the two guys said to the other that he just “never eats,” and “needs to eat more,” but the other didn’t seem to have much of an answer as to why, and just sat there in front of his cereal and partially eaten plate of food.
As college students we don’t make time to eat. And that’s the issue. We get out of bed and go right to class instead of getting breakfast before class. We skip a full lunch in favor of a quick to-go one and we cut our dinners short because we have to go to a meeting. Some of us only go to eat when we have someone to eat with and some cut our meals short because our friends want to leave. Others of us go an entire day without eating or eat snacks all day. Some stick with the TV dinners all day, and some people can’t stand the food so get a burger for nearly every meal.
There’s a lot of issues and causes surrounding us college students not eating. For one, dining hall food needs to improve. After all, for underclassman it is often their only source of food, particularly for the freshman who don’t have access to cars and live on campus, or who go to smaller colleges like the one that I attend.
Campus food can oftentimes lack variety as well. Great food is great to have until you’re eating the same thing every day, and dining service companies need to be more cognizant of this.
We need to learn some self-discipline. Getting up an extra hour to feed ourselves in the morning is of paramount importance. We all know breakfast is the “most important meal of the day,” but it’s important because it fills us with the energy we’re going to need for later on in the day. And greater energy means greater focus, patience, memory, cognition. All ways to better handle the work load.
We need to stop caring about what our friends are doing too. It’s great to sit down and eat dinner with your friends, but if for whatever reason you don’t have a lot of friends, or they aren’t available whenever you want to eat, we need to be able to go get food or go to the dining hall by ourselves. Get over the shame, embarrassment or whatever else you feel about going alone. You’re a busy person and you can’t always wait or synchronize schedules with everyone all the time.
We need to take some time and enjoy a meal more instead of rushing through it. Food is important. Make sure you prioritize it.
We need to make sure we’re getting nutrition if we really don’t have time to eat. For those really busy days when we actually have too much to do to squeeze in lunch, or we have to eat dinner much later at night, make sure you’re getting food in somewhere. Eat an apple on your way to a meeting. Bring snacks to class, and take advantage of food that is easy to carry, but fills you up a lot.
We need to keep ourselves on a schedule of some sorts too. Eating three meals in one day and then only having one the next day isn’t healthy and messes with your body. Start eating less for a while and you’ll start to fill up faster, but then you’re getting less food than you actually need, so keep yourself at least on somewhat of a schedule.
And finally, make an effort to eat healthy. Pizza every day isn’t going to help you with your health any time soon, and neither is going to McDonald’s all the time to avoid dining hall food. This goes back to actually helping you in college. Eat healthier and your cognitive abilities will be a little sharper which will only help you when your studying for your finals.
With all this you’ll be able to get ahead a little and actually stay healthy.
The great irony of all this, though: we have all the food we need sitting in front of us and being made for us, yet we can’t seem to will ourselves to eat enough, but people in the poorest places of the world are dying to eat anything. Strange how the developed world works sometimes.
