You have been on campus for over a month. You have yet to achieve a routine eating schedule or get to the gym more than twice over the course of the semester. You worry about the changing of your body, the lack of breakfast you eat before a 10am Spanish class. It is getting hard to choose a run on the treadmill over a nap in your bed. This seems like a problem, a reason to tear yourself apart.
As a solution, you go to the gym one day and run for 30 minutes until you sweat all of the weekend’s toxins out of your body. At night, you twist and turn trying to get enough sleep to wake up early and at least get a banana in before class. But in the end, you feel worse for failing at completing that “healthy” lifestyle we all aim to achieve.
The problem is not that you haven’t been to the gym or haven’t been eating enough breakfast. The problem—at least as I see it—is that students try to live the life of a person with a perfectly scheduled routine. But we are not those people. We have class at 8am on Tuesdays, but 1pm on Wednesdays and Fridays. We stay in the library until it closes to finish that essay that has to be turned in the next morning, leaving us with much less sleep than our bodies crave. We are not 30 year olds with a 9-5 job, eating breakfast before work and going to the gym after. And that is okay.
“Health” does not have just one look. It does not mean eating salads every day for lunch, drinking tea before bed, or doing a juice cleanse after a weekend of drinking. For college students, it means doing what’s best for you, right now. If that is sleeping until the last minute to feel rested or choosing food based on cravings instead of calories, then we should do it. Even though the focus of health is on the body, it has become a burden on the mind. The increasing anxiety we feel about whether we’re doing the “right” thing and especially if we’re doing what every other “healthy” person is doing is the exact opposite of health.
It is time to look at health differently, to ignore what TikTok or Instagram is telling you and make decisions based on your own barriers. Yes, it’s important to take care of your body, but it’s just as important to take care of your mind. Encourage yourself to achieve comfort and happiness for your own health, instead of aiming for an unrealistic goal through unhealthy habits.