By Moving away from home, where your mum was always making you healthy homecooked meals and encouraging you to eat your vegetables, to university, where your new friends push you to buy takeout food and drink heavily, it can be easy to gain weight and fall into unhealthy habits. Students in their first year of university can gain as much as 4kg thanks to a diet of processed foods, heavy alcohol consumption and a lack of exercise.
To help you to stay healthy and fit during your university experience here are some top tips.
Make Your Own Meals
In your first year it’s easy to rely on takeaways and quick, processed ready meals, but this will be bad for both your health and your bank balance. To ensure that you enjoy tasty, fresh and nutritious meals, invest in a cookbook and try to make as many of your own meals as possible. This can be time consuming, so try to prepare your meals in advance and then freeze them to save you time later.
Incorporate Fitness Into Your Social Life
A key part of the university experience is making new friends and enjoying activities together, and often this revolves around spending nights out together drinking alcohol. A great way to combine healthy living with socialising is to join a university sports society or team. This will get you active and help you to make new friends at the same time.
Workout In Your Room
If you’re busy studying, or simply feeling a little lazy, then getting to the gym can feel like a struggle, so invest in some weights and equipment for your room and try to do a few exercises every day. Find simple activities like push ups, sit ups or curls that will be easy for you to do regularly so that you keep fit even if you’re busy.
Don’t Treat Your Time Abroad As A Holiday
When you study abroad it can be easy to view the experience as a holiday and indulge in loads of fried, tasty treats and refreshing drinks, but this approach can leave you struggling to get your health back on track later on. To avoid this, opt for quality student accommodation, like the Collegiate building in Valencia, which has 350 different luxury apartments for you to choose from. Paying for more premium accommodation will make you focus a little more on your spending.
Avoid Social Smoking
When you’re out drinking heavily it can be easy to succumb to peer pressure and have a puff or two on a cigarette, but even smoking a little can cause serious health issues. If you smoke regularly then use a dedicated stop smoking service that can help you to kick the habit, but if you only smoke socially then make sure that you avoid going out with people who carry cigarettes on nights out and try your best not to hang around in areas where you’re allowed to smoke at any point during your evening.
