Walking Into The Sweet Unknown…
Continuing off our previous blog:
HIGH SCHOOL TO COLLEGE
I recently reflected on the transition from home to College for young 18 year olds as my 18 year old sister has just begun her journey at her first semester of College.
Most of us spend the first 18 years or so just showing up to prepared meals from our parents and eating what looks good or what we feel like at school for lunch.
We develop feelings and emotions based on how things taste without any real sense of what we are putting into our bodies or what the food is actually doing to us.
If we are honest, we don’t truly know what a protein is and what it does and its relevance and importance. And the same goes for carbs or fats.
Yet still, mostly unaware, uncertain and uneducated in something we will do 3-4+ per day, everyday, we head off on our own, to College.
We fend for ourselves now.
With new independence and a lease on life, we are our own man or woman and mostly make our own decisions.
As we branch off onto our own, experimenting, experiencing, we continue making our own decisions based on how we feel, not necessarily by what we know.
This is the place where kids party, begin to drink alcohol (empty calories) stay up late eating chips, pizza, calzones and other calorie dense foods.
And yet still, we don’t know or understand how to eat.
And the cafeteria at college, a buffet of whatever you want.
A better understanding as to why it’s so easy to gain the “freshman 15.”
Throughout these 4 years, we stack bad behaviors and build more patterns and conditioning that we will eventually have to overcome as an adult.
It is here we can develop an ever growing UNHEALTHY relationship with food.
DEVELOP ASSOCIATIONS
After a few years of being invincible, relying on our high metabolism, our reliance lets us down. Our bodies carrying extra weight. We feel crappy about ourselves.
We associate eating with weight gain, associating weight gain with feeling awful about ourselves, how we are less attractive, desirable and even how we won’t be loved.
We can develop eating disorders that will create lasting impact on not only our mental state and psyche but our overall health.
We turn to the thing that makes the most logical sense in the moment, exercise.
EXERCISE TO THE RESCUE…OR NOT?
Exercise is seen as the remedy.
Unfortunately, some see it or make it as a form of punishment to themselves (setting more undesirable patterns.)
Here too, we develop feelings and a relationship with exercising.
“It is difficult, uncomfortable and results do not come quickly.”
In the day and age we live in, of speed, convenience and instant gratification because it doesn’t come easy or the results quick enough and we can’t see past the initial discomfort, we likely throw in the towel.
Never developing a healthy consistent relationship with exercise.
We fall back on our old patterns, go back to what we know, what’s easy.
This pattern continues on and off for years.
We try fad diets, quick fixes, shake diets and certain things MAY work and provide us with an initial weight loss that we feel good about….
But it never lasts.
To be continued: Part 3 The War With Nutrition:
Building Your Army: How to Overcome
