How to eat when you have a final in three hours and you don't recognize anything on the review sheet

    Hello everyone, Matthew writing. Today I want to talk about food. Specifically, how you can eat when you have two problem sets, several pages of short answer questions, an essay, a lab, three online quizzes, and a verbal presentation to do in the next 10 hours (purely hypothetical, I promise!). But first, I want to explain why you should eat in such a perilous situation.

    It's easy to think that you can just power through your hunger, especially when 20 minutes of eating could be 20 minutes of essay completed. However, hunger is not just your body telling you to eat so you don't die in the next 30 days. When you're hungry, all sorts of bodily processes slow down to conserve energy. And when you're working, there is one bodily process you definitely don't want to slow down. Thinking. It's just like the candy bar commercials say: "You're not you when you're hungry."

    Now, the next paragraph is me talking about the science behind this post, so if you're not interested you can skip to the actual food.

    How food influences your brain is still poorly understood, on account of both food and the brain being extremely complex. However, one thing we know for sure is that the brain consumes a lot of glucose. When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks them down into glucose which then enters your blood. What's important is how quickly the carbohydrates get processed, and therefore how quickly they enter your blood. Pure crystal sugar will give you plenty of glucose, but it gets processed extremely fast, resulting in a blood sugar "spike" followed by a rapid drop below desirable levels. An apple, on the other hand, will be slower to digest and give you a sustained release of glucose, even if the total amount of carbs is the same. The goal of this article is to give foods with the ideal sustained release of glucose, so that you can eat and remain energized for as long as possible. Toward that goal, let's begin.

1. Peanut Butter Sandwich

    This one is the ultimate in speed. Slap some peanut butter on a slice of bread and slap another slice of bread on the peanut butter. You could add jelly, but that's an extra 20 seconds, right? I lived off this breakfast for a few years starting around the end of middle school. My recommendation? Avoid peanut butter with added salt or sugar. The peanut on its own has plenty of flavor. Also, whole wheat bread is better for your blood glucose. Some whole wheat bread is admittedly kind of gross, but if you try a few brands you can probably find one you like. Combine your sandwich with a glass of milk or milk-adjacent beverage, and you have the perfect way to practice speed eating with a bit of simple deliciousness.

2. Oatmeal

    For many of us, oatmeal sounds kind of boring. I mean, it's just oats, right? However, in our modern era, oatmeal has come a long way. Just look at the common flavors. Maple and brown sugar? Apple cinnamon? Nowadays, oatmeal is practically a dessert. Not only that, it's a healthy dessert. The added sugar is usually pretty low compared to alternatives (*cough* cereal *cough*), and it's pretty easy to find whole grain options. When I make oatmeal, I always add slightly less than the required amount of hot water, and then add a little milk to top it off. If you want to get fancy, you can even start making your own flavors, but that's a bit outside the scope of this article.

3. Yogurt

    Possibly the most "dessertey" of the foods on this list, yogurt generally has a lot of added sugar. Interestingly, however, yogurt tends to give sustained energy similarly to whole grains. As long as you avoid yogurt with massive amounts of added sugar, it fits the bill for a good breakfast food. In fact, if you look online, you'll see that a lot of breakfast recipes include yogurt. Admittedly, I have a bit less experience with breakfast yogurt, but I can make a few recommendations. Plain yogurt is ideal, but I've never liked the flavor. If you're feeling experimental, you could try it yourself and spice it up with added fruit and such. Lightly sweetened is more my style, since you don't get blasted with yogurt flavor, but you still get something other than sugar flavor. For that, my go-to brand is Siggis. Fortunately for me (perhaps not for Siggis) they go on sale often, so in many cases they're really cheap too.

4. Bagel With Peanut Butter

    My survival depends on the existence of bagels with peanut butter. I have been living off of this every morning for years now. It is like the most advanced form of a peanut butter sandwich without adding new ingredients. I'm not sure the exact science behind it, but when you put peanut butter on the hot bagel it becomes melty and more delicious than any other ingredient I can imagine. Remember to look for whole wheat bagels to make sure that they're filling. My go-to is Dave's Killer Bread everything bagels (when they're not sold out), since they're dense enough to keep me nourished through three consecutive classes.

    To summarize, eat fruit and whole grains, but also make sure you eat no matter what. It might not be obvious, but that food is going to more than pay for the time it takes to make by helping you work faster.

Unless you have 30 minutes left to finish your essay. Then you might want to hold off for a bit.