“Ugh this kale and celery juice is so delicious,” says the same girl that drinks more beer than the Dos Equis man himself. Why is it that during the day Bucknell girls love to wait 20 minutes in line for the quinoa bar (hold the feta please), and then spend the night at a different kind of bar? Do you know how confusing this is for your body? Your body cannot decide whether you are a nutritionist or Lindsay Lohan. And I am not talking about her Parent Trap days. This split personality between day health and night lack thereof leads me to the question, how do we find the proper balance between barre and bar, between running and running from the scale, between meditation and madness?
It can be extremely difficult to be healthy all day everyday in college. It seems that most Bucknell girls make an effort to be health conscious, but fall into certain unhealthy traps. Take lack of sleep for example. It is easy to have the “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” mentality when there are so many people to see and activities to do. You can convince yourself that you feel energized after two hours of sleep by clutching on to a venti from 7th Street. You can even hide those dark circles under your eyes with woman’s best friend, concealer. But after a while, your habits will take a toll. There will be a day where you wake up at noon, put on a pair of dirty sweatpants, eat a stack of pancakes, be too exhausted to go to the gym, look too dysfunctional to go to the library and then you will say, “Oh. This is what that article was talking about.” And when you say this to yourself, you will realize how important it is to take care of your body.
So, before you get to the dirty sweatpants and pancake point, I want to say that I am a big believer in small steps. Choose one unhealthy habit to change and set a goal. This goal can be as small as getting eight hours of sleep a night or drinking eight glasses of water a day. These small goals will save you from running your body down. If you can improve just one thing at a time, your body and mind will thank you.