I often wander into Ralphs with a sensible list and my most demure intentions, determined to purchase practicalities and nothing else. Twenty minutes later, after I have unspooled an embarrassing amount of time doom roaming the aisles, I find myself in the supplement section, studying Olly Women’s Daily as if it could absolve my chaotic girl dinner and the inevitable crash that follows, both emotional and biological. The shelves read like a pastel menu of better selves: skinnier, clearer, less puffy, better slept, more focused, more unbothered, more photogenic. Collagen for your skin. Magnesium for your mood. Essentials for every woman.
Little did I know that many of the vitamins most aggressively marketed in gummy form are water-soluble. If your body does not need the excess, it simply excretes it. In other words, you can spend forty dollars on the performance of wellness and still feel exactly like a student who ate “breakfast for dinner” at De Neve. Even when a supplement is absorbed, absorption does not automatically translate into beautification. The bottle can promise radiance and focus but unfortunately, our biology cannot work with a tangible tagline.
So, before you spend additional money on a sweetened supplement, I recommend redirecting those funds toward options that are more realistic than the influencer lifestyle—and more compatible with the constraints of campus living (e.g., a mini fridge, a microwave, and a BruinCard).
Your gut is an information center, constantly sending signals upward through the vagus nerve, which is one reason stress, hunger and sleep deprivation can shift mood with startling speed; your body is not being dramatic so much as it is being precise, converting your conditions into consequences and the fix is rarely a gummy with good branding, but rather food, water and a few strategic habits that make your system feel less like it is buffering.
The cycle syncing reels are not entirely a myth, but they are rarely the whole story
What makes the wellness reel so persuasive is not the chia seed or the lemon water but the certainty it offers. It produces a clean sequence for a messy body, and when your month feels unpredictable, that structure reads like relief. The problem is that certainty is scalable for marketing, while bodies are not scalable in real life, which is why a one-size protocol so often turns into self-blame when it fails.
Corporate America capitalizes on that gap by monetizing both sides of the same problem: first, it saturates everyday life with ultra processed foods that are formulated for shelf stability, low cost and maximum palatability, which makes steady eating materially harder on a student schedule; then, it sells you the “correction” through the wellness economy, where basic nutrition gets repackaged into a protocol you can buy, follow and feel morally soothed by.
Sea moss can help some people, sometimes but claims are often overstated, and product quality varies (look for third-party testing when possible).
This is also why the Victoria’s Secret model diet hacks genre keeps resurfacing every few months: the content is built around a deadline driven aesthetic, meaning it is designed for what a body can be coaxed into looking like before an event, a shoot, or a runway and then it gets circulated as if it were general guidance for ordinary bodies living ordinary weeks. The result is not just misinformation but misapplication, because the marketing move is always the same: compress a complex physiological system into a simple routine, attach a promise to it and let certainty do the selling.
I am not opposed to every rule that circulates on social media, because a few of them persist for a reason. Across the menstrual cycle, hormones shift in ways that can change appetite, fluid retention, bowel motility and even sleep quality, so it is common for cravings, bloating and fatigue to feel louder in the luteal phase, meaning the week or so before your period. Research consistently finds that many people report stronger cravings for sweets and carbohydrate-rich foods during that window, which is not a failure of willpower but a predictable response to physiological change.
What gets distorted online is the conclusion that you can engineer your way out of these shifts through a rigid, one-size-fits-all protocol or a single “hormone balancing” ingredient. In reality, the interventions with the best payoff are boring and foundational: eating at regular intervals so your blood sugar is steadier, getting enough protein and fiber so you stay full longer, hydrating adequately and prioritizing warm, digestible meals when your gut is already sensitive. Most of the time, your body is not asking for a hack. It is asking for conditions in which it can function without improvising survival all week.
The Two Non-Negotiables
Debloating is often less about eliminating foods and more about correcting the two things most students chronically undershoot: protein and hydration. When meals are light on protein and you’re running on iced coffee and inertia, digestion can feel sluggish, satiety becomes unreliable and bloating can worsen simply because the gut isn’t being supported by steady intake and adequate fluid. Secondly, water is a real superfood! Hydration is especially sneaky because thirst and hunger signals can overlap; what feels like an urgent need to snack can, in some cases, be partly a hydration cue. A simple, non-dramatic test: drink water first, wait 10 minutes, then decide what you actually want to eat. Higher-protein meals reliably increase satiety and reduce perceived hunger and a practical baseline is ~0.8 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, more if you’re highly active (unless a clinician has advised otherwise.
Dorm Proof, Budget Proof, Still Real Food
Greek yogurt, instant oats, eggs in a microwave mug, frozen vegetables, and rinsed canned beans or lentils aren’t trendy but they work. Even one dependable protein you can tolerate consistently will do more for your mood, energy, and satiety than a supplement you forget about three days in. Hill food can absolutely cover this: build a plate around a protein (eggs, tofu, chicken, beans, Greek yogurt), add fiber (veg, fruit, whole grains), and you’re already supporting digestion without doing anything dramatic. If you’re shopping, Trader Joe’s is reliably affordable for protein staples and frozen meals that are actually meal-shaped. Ralphs is great for plain kefir, yogurt, and fermented foods that can support digestion without being marketed as miracles. And on campus, Bruin Plate makes it easy to assemble a balanced meal without having to decode wellness language.
Also: I eat a suspicious amount of Trader Joe’s snacks under the assumption that cute packaging equals health. It does not. The problem isn’t Trader Joe’s but it’s snacking culture, where you graze all day and still feel oddly unsatisfied. I’m trying to swap the constant nibbling for meals that actually register, and if anyone has tips for escaping the snack loop without turning food into a discipline project, I genuinely want them.
And because it must be said: a lot of açaí bowls are basically dessert in a bowl. Sorry to burst your bubble but it is often packed with added sugar and calorie-dense toppings. It’s not automatically a “healthy meal” substitute unless you build it like one (think: protein + fiber, not just fruit + granola + honey).
Comfort Food Is Also a Strategy
Comfort should not be exiled from any wellness conversation. Some weeks, the most regulating thing I do is show up to Upside Down on a Friday for open community painting and drink a warm, enormous mocha, as if it were a small reset button I can hold in both hands. At other times, it is matcha served properly in a wide ceramic tea bowl at Le Pain Quotidien, not gulped or gamified, but held long enough for my breathing to settle. Sometimes it is the grilled cheese and tomato soup at Kerckhoff Coffee, eaten without multitasking or multiple laptop tabs. These meals matter!
I grew up with food as steadiness rather than performance, something that held the day together and did not need to be earned. After moving to the United States, I learned how easily students can be worn down by a food environment built for speed and marketing rather than nourishment, where everything is optimized, portioned, and branded, yet still leaves you feeling oddly unfinished. If you have a comfort spot in Westwood or on campus that feels genuinely restorative, I would love to hear it. I am collecting them as small, reliable sites of normalcy, one bowl at a time.