Losing weight.
This idea to some people may be easy—surely, it should be easy to work out every day and eat all of the healthiest options that are necessary for a college student, right? I have been in a weird battle with my body for almost 5 years. During high school, my weight shot up (due to stress, increasing pressure about college, and of course the weird drama that surrounds it) and I remember feeling devastated that I wasn’t as skinny as my best friends. When high school finished, I lost a ton of weight and kept it off for 2 years when I went to community college. These years were my unhealthy years, ironically, because I had developed an eating disorder. I lived on the scale and would get irrationally angry at myself if I even ate something that was not calorie counted for the day.
That changed when I came to St. Edward’s University. I felt my mentality about food slowly shift away from those previous toxic thoughts. And yes, I gained back weight. It has not been the easiest experience to deal with my weight gain, but then again, I do still have remnants of an eating disorder that affect my daily thinking. As crazy as it sounds, my weight gain was not even that drastic—it was almost necessary from years of not taking care of myself; not eating anything.
We need to shift the way we think about what it means to be healthy. Losing weight should not be the priority item to why someone needs to eat vegetables, fruit, and maintain a good, balanced diet. People should do it because it is healthier for them in the long-run so we can have a stable life; to stray away from what our body cannot handle. We should also look more into cheaper solutions for healthy living. I wish someone had told me buying bulks of frozen fruit was better for my wallet than constantly buying fresh fruit, only to watch it decay because I could not get to it all. Buying frozen fruit is just so much easier because you can make it into a smoothie and even have it on-the-go.
In other words, I’m tired of the weight-loss culture that dominated my life for two years. I’m tired of the transformation pictures. I’m tired of the over-expensive work-out clothes saturated in Instagram pictures.
I want to see how people are doing mentally, cost-effective ways to meal plan, and people genuinely having fun with their work-out tips.