It’s easy to let your nutrition go on autopilot when you’re in college, but look man – food is important.
We talk about all sorts of little hacks and strategies for improving your life on this podcast, but the food you eat affects it more than almost any of them.
If you’re not eating well, your body won’t work well and neither will your brain. You’ll feel tired and lethargic all the time, your learning abilities will be diminished, and – let’s face it – you’re increasing your risk for a whole host of problems later in life (something I’m learning more and more about as I read Good Calories, Bad Calories).
When you do eat well on a regular basis, you feel energetic much more often, get sick less, and your brain is primed to perform.
As the strongman Elliot Hulse once said:
“The most important part of the game is your game piece!”
And eating well isn’t as time-consuming – or expensive – as you might think.
In this episode, Martin and I will discuss strategies you can use to eat healthily, quickly, and cheaply.
Building healthy eating habits starts with accepting one core value:
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
Don’t worry about eating perfectly, and don’t think you have to give up pizza forever. Your diet doesn’t have to be perfect, because if you’re currently eating like an average American, even a few simple improvements can make a massive positive difference.
For instance, here’s a simple stir-fry recipe I used quite often when I was in college. It’s packed with chicken, eggs, veggies, and rice, has tons of nutritional content, and ends up costing only about $3.50 per meal – and you could get that even lower if you used bulk rice instead of the instant stuff like I did.
That’s just one idea – this episode (and the links below) will give you lots more.
Things mentioned in this episode:
- A College Guide to Eating Healthy – my guest post at Nerd Fitness
- How I Cut My Average Meal Cost to $3.57 by Meal Prepping
- Actual Poor Student Cookbook
- Staci Ardison’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure meals
- Rice cooker – lots of options out there; this one seemed like the best combo of cheap price + good reviews
- CGP Grey – Star Trek transporter
- Existential Comics – transporter problem
- Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
- Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
- r/slowcooking
- r/eatcheapandhealthy
- Kicking a soda-drinking habit
- Good Eats – best cooking show ever
- If-then habits
- WTH effect
Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.
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