Eating regular meals

Eating regularly boosts your ability to study by keeping you alert and maintaining steady blood sugar levels – you can’t think when you’re hungry. Eating at regular intervals also helps ensure that you don’t get too hungry, making it easier for you to regulate your eating and reducing the need for snacking. But many find it challenging to maintain a regular meal schedule. These tips by the FSHS will help you to start eating at regular intervals.

Find a schedule that suits you

Eating regular meals doesn’t mean that your schedule needs to be set to specific times. As a student, your days may vary from having 8 a.m. lectures to entire days of studying at home by yourself. However, it’s important to structure your day around the main meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Depending on your needs, add one to two snacks plus something small in the evening to compliment the main meals. Eating every 3 to 4 hours suits most people, but you’ll have to experiment to find what suits you best.

Think ahead and use reminders

When you first start to practise eating regularly, it may help to plan ahead. For example, if your goal is to have a snack in the afternoon, try to think of a suitable time beforehand. What will you eat, do you have something ready at home? What if you get home later than expected? Could you keep some trail mix and snack bars in your bag?

If you haven’t been eating regular meals, your body’s hunger and fullness signals may not be working properly. At first, you may even feel like you have to eat even though you aren’t hungry. But if you persevere you’ll notice that you start feeling hungry before each meal. If there’s a chance that you may forget to eat, try setting an alarm on your phone or sticking a post-it on your fridge door to remind you. Or maybe you and your friends or roommates could agree to have dinner together?

Take one step at a time

It may be tempting to make big changes right away, but building a routine that’ll stick requires patience. In other words, when you first start to try eating regularly, it’s a good idea to focus on one meal at a time, for instance by telling yourself, “The next thing I’m going to practise is having lunch at around noon.”

P.S. By having lunch at student restaurants subsidised by Kela, you get a meal that adheres to nutritional recommendations without any effort on your part. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would you?