Category Archives: Wellness

Whether you live on campus or off, in a dorm room with no kitchen or with a fully-applianced one, learning to cook regular, nutritious meals for yourself is one of the most important life skills you’ll ever learn.

It’s also a very daunting challenge if you never had to cook for yourself before and have no idea where to start.

I know I can’t be the only person out there who’s struggled with feeding herself regularly, and there are many things I wish I’d learned or thought of earlier. So, some things I’ve picked up over the last few years:

GENERAL TIPS & RESOURCES

• Prioritise nutrition by planning meal times into your schedule. This means at least breakfast, lunch and dinner!
• Eat a high-fibre breakfast. A bowl of cereal with yoghurt or milk gives me a huge boost of energy that keeps my hunger pangs away longer than anything else I’ve tried so far.
• Buy fresh, local produce wherever possible. Not only are these often cheaper, fresh fruits and veggies you don’t have to cook make for make for much healthier snacks. I cheat myself into getting my daily fruit intake by carrying an apple around and gnawing on that when I’m hungry in the middle of the day (at least, when I remember to!).
• Speaking of cheating, an easy way of getting part of your daily vegetable intake is to chop some vegetables to throw in with your uncooked rice (if you like rice, that is). Good vegetables for this purpose include squash and (baby) Shanghainese bak choy, but technically anything can do. Experiment and see what you like.
• The January issue of Student Health 101 @ UBC has a great section on basic cooking in dorms and/or apartments that is worth checking out.

COOKING IN DORMS

By ‘dorms’ here, I mean the traditional sleeping space with no attached kitchen and/or a communal kitchen with limited to no cooking facilities. Think microwave and fridge.

• Introducing my favourite appliance in first year: the Toastess electric multi-purpose pot. This magnificent little kettle doubles as a cooking pot, which allowed me to make mac ‘n’ cheese, ramen and soup. If I’d been into eggs back then, I would have boiled them. Think creatively — whatever you can cook in a regular pot can probably be done here (in smaller portions).
• For those of you who enjoy a rice-based diet and dislike cafeteria rice, it may be worth investing in a small rice cooker. You can bring back your side dishes from the caf in a reuseable container. Fancier brands like Panasonic even have special settings to make banana bread, but recipes claiming you can do this in any old rice cooker abounds on the internet. (I haven’t tried making banana bread in a regular cooker, so don’t take my word for it.)

COOKING IN A KITCHEN

You don’t have the skill or time to make meals out of whatever fresh produce happens to be selling today. Cooking for yourself for the whole week freaks you out. If this sounds like you, read on.

• Invest in a good beginners’ cookbook if you need it. The one I swear by is Starting Out by Julie Van Rosendaal, which I picked up at Book Warehouse when it was on sale. (Regular price maybe around $25.) Targeted towards college student novices in the kitchen, it explains basic cooking terminology, techniques, and different kinds of produce. The recipes I’ve tried are consistently decent and this is my go-to guide when I need to find out how many minutes it takes to cook a fish or boil pasta.
• Learn how to make a few quick, basic meals and go from there. A few things I can count on myself doing include fried rice, fried dumplings, vegetable soup, and pasta.
• Enjoy variety on the limited knowledge you have by creating a schedule for what you’ll eat each day and leave learning new recipes and/or experimentation for the weekend. Sounds pedantic, but it keeps you from worrying about what your next meal is going to be. This is also a good way of making sure you’re covering all the basic food groups in your day/week.
• Make large batches of whatever you’re cooking and freeze or refridgerate the extra portions for another time. Some people like to make enough food for the week, but do note that it is unhealthy to keep cooked food in the fridge for more than two or three days. Leftovers are also my quick and easy solution to tomorrow’s lunch.
• Once a month, I like to bake or make things I can freeze for future meals, e.g. cheese and parsley scones (to go with my soup), Chinese scallion pancakes (烙饼), leek turnovers (韭菜盒子), etc. You’ll thank yourself for planning ahead, especially during exam time. Alternatively you can just buy frozen foods — I need to stock up on dumplings and wonton soon.
• Frozen vegetables like spinach are a good alternative to fresh. Not only do you save on copious rinsing (as anyone who’s dealt with fresh spinach knows) and create space for other, less pesky vegetables in the fridge, frozen spinach is harvested closer to peak ripeness and flash-frozen then, so retains most of its nutrients (so I’m told), instead of fresh spinach which needs to be picked earlier in order to be transported to its final destination before wilting away. (Fresh local produce is obviously the best choice, but not everyone always has time to go to farmers’ markets.)
• Ask friends for tips and simple recipes they use. Take a look at the UBC Wellness Centre’s Guide to A+ Eating. Check out recipe sites and food blogs, but don’t stress if you don’t get it straight away — these are usually targeted towards people already comfortable in the kitchen. And you will be.

Got more tips? I’m always ready to hear tips on eating better!

As if the universe was actually paying attention to my ramblings for once, it heard me say, ‘I don’t have the willpower to go to bed early,’ and sent an evil bug into my system that knocked me out for most of yesterday.

Oh, right, staying healthy is a good reason to get enough sleep.

It’s my fault, really — in high school, I discovered (through many rounds of trial-and-error) that if I lost out on so much as two nights of good sleep (read: 9 hours), I would be down and out for the week. Since coming to UBC, I’ve managed to go many, many more nights without this happening and was obviously lulled into a false sense of security on the subject of my immune system. Well, no more.

(Of course, I could have just picked something up lately from goodness knows where, but let’s run with the sleep thing for now, ‘kay?)

I’m currently throwing all my responsibilities to the wind and am doing nothing but sleep. This isn’t really hard, since I feel too lousy to do anything else, and have no inclination of dragging this out.

Also boiling down the rules I set for myself in my previous post down to one:

At 6 pm, everything must stop. This includes the laptop and internet.

Advice for things to do instead:

Cook dinner so you can eat at 7 pm, as opposed to, you know, 10 pm. Shower early. Find activities unrelated to the internet and/or computer to do. (There was a time before the internet, you know.) Do not read fiction in the evening — you know you’re incapable of stopping once you start and will just read the whole book in one go, which might be until 3 am. If you’re desperate for something to do, go to bed earlier to get up earlier. Now there’s a novel thought.

But just go to bed at the same time everyday.

I leave you now to go back to sleep, but not before sharing an awesome Nike ad:

We’ve all heard the news before: a good night’s sleep helps you do better in school and/or work. Getting more sleep keeps your immune system up, energises you for longer periods of time, helps with memory retention, thinking on the spot, and a number of other good things. From personal experience, I know that my grades show as much as 10% in difference when I’ve been running on little sleep for several weeks and when I’ve been getting adequate sleep for a few.

I know all this, and yet still have trouble putting myself in bed at a reasonable hour. Why?

Lack of willpower.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it, that I don’t have the willpower to go to bed, especially when I’ve been feeling pooped for hours? It makes more sense when you look at all the tasks I have to do for the week and all the readings I haven’t done, particularly when I’ve fallen behind (yes, already!). I think, ‘If I stay up a little longer to do [insert task here], it’ll be one fewer item on my list tomorrow.’

But that’s not what always happens, because more often than not, I get distracted by technology. See, I’ve been pooped for hours! I just want to sit in my chair and read emails, or write a blog post, or do something completely unrelated to school when I get home. To top it off, I’m often also quite hungry because I find it easier to skip meals when pooped than to get up and make a good meal. (Yes, I need to change that too.)

So I’m setting myself a bunch of new rules:

• At 6 pm, all work for the day must stop. Go make dinner. Read a book. Plan for tomorrow. But no actual work.
• Laptop may only be switched on before 6 pm if it is actually needed for the task. Internet time should be scheduled and limited. (Make a list of things I need to do on the internet for when I am online, not as they come up.) After 6 pm, I can only switch it on if I have fed myself and showered and have a specific purpose for switching it on, e.g. writing for myself.
• Be in bed to fall asleep by 10 pm.

The problem with these, of course, is that they’re really hard to implement. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep knowing that I have way too much to do and not enough time to complete everything in. Then what? Stay up to do more or stay awake worrying?

These are the arguments I go over, but hope that if I keep insisting on these bedtime hours, I’ll use my time more wisely and procrastinate less before 6 pm because I know that I’m not going to have much more time in the evening to do anything I don’t do now.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to make me go to bed on time, I’d be happy to hear them.

On an unrelated note, the bright side of the world being this cold is that the ground is frozen over and I can cut across grass without worrying about my boots getting muddy.

There is something about the first day of a new year that attracts us. The first day of the lunar new year. A birthday. We promise ourselves that this year, things will be different, that this year, things will get better.

In reality, we know that there’s no physical difference in this day than any other. That we make these days special in our minds, and that the promise of a fresh start is one we’ve created. We identify days we’ll ‘try again’ all throughout the year: the first day of a month, the first day of a new week, tomorrow, today.

And there is power in choosing a new beginning, today, here, now, that we mustn’t forget, later on in the year, when we are weary.

But since it’s sometimes easier to embark on new beginnings with other people, and New Year’s Day is as communal a day as we’re going to get, here’s to the power of community in helping us make the changes we want.

WHAT ARE YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS (IF ANY)?

Following my exhaustion over the last couple of years, I thought really hard about what life means to me, and have decided to go Back to Basics.

(Yes, I thematised my resolutions. Sounds a little artificial, but it helps give a tighter focus to what I want out of my 2011. And I’m not the only one doing it: Jason Mraz wrote a pretty awesome post on his Now Here’s Resolutions that I think you should check out.)

In 2011, I want to:

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