Eating Healthy, Living Healthy.

What’s good readers? It’s Moiz coming at you again on this fine fall Thursday. I’ll get right into the topic of discussion this week!

As you all know, this past weekend was Thanksgiving weekend. This for me personally meant three things; food, an extra day off, and more food! I’m sure many of you were thinking the same thing as last week came to an end, and I can’t blame you. The long weekend was basically our reading week at UTSC and most of us used it to relax and forget about work and everything related to it! Now, this post isn’t meant to make you feel guilty about taking in a few or a lot of extra calories, not at all! I’m just bringing this up because it is what inspired me to write this week’s post about eating healthy and in general, just living a healthy lifestyle.

In the life of a University student, eating healthy is usually not a priority because essentially, we have no time to think about what we are eating and/or what we should be eating. Usually, our schedules give us about an hour for lunch and sometimes the same for dinner. Most people at UTSC would probably choose the ever-so-popular Tim Horton’s, or another fast food restaurant. to grab a bite and that would ultimately be their meal for that time. 

I’ve narrowed down the reasons why students are so attracted to these kinds of foods to 3 basic explanations: it’s cheap, it’s made fast, and it tastes great! The food being cheap is an obvious pro for students because well… we’re students! Food being prepared and served quickly is also a pro because anything that takes too long might get in the way of something else we have scheduled and most people aren’t able to deal with that. Knowing why and how we neglect our health is an important step in the process of ultimately improving it.

Take a second to think about your daily diet and what’s missing from it. Are you getting enough servings of fruits and vegetables throughout the day? Are you taking in enough healthy calories to last you a day? Eating healthy is just the first step in the process of living a healthy life. I can’t really give professional advice on this subject but I can give advice from the prospective of a fellow student.

What is the best way to live your life? Objectively, we know what’s going into our bodies. We know all the chemicals that are in foods that we buy and in the foods that we eat. We know that we need to take in more vitamins and take in less fat. We know all these things, yet we choose to not change them. The right path to being a happy and healthy person is to do everything that we already know we should do. Take care of your body. Take care of your mind. Learn to manage stress. These are all things that we KNOW. If someone came up to me and asked me to help them improve their lifestyle, I would tell them to go on a diet. I don’t mean a diet to lose weight; I mean a diet to get healthy foods in their system.  I’d tell them to eat lots of vegetables, a lot of good quality proteins, and drink a lot of water.  Just doing this alone will give the person a feeling of how the body feels when it’s flowing in a more natural, less tense state. That would be step one, just eating healthier and giving your body a chance to recover. Step two would simply be to smile more. Smile to everyone, makes them smile back. Too many people overlook this step. If there is an easy way to make yourself or the people around you feel better, it is to smile. In my books these two steps would be the base of the process of improving one’s lifestyle.

Tips to healthier living/eating:

• Try to eat at least one homemade meal a day.

• Always have breakfast (helps resist the urge to snack on unhealthy snacks and keeps you energized)

• If you have a spare hour or two, go visit the gym! (The weight room and the basketball gym is usually always open between 7am and 10:30pm every day!)

• Visit the Health and Wellness Centre in the Student Centre- There is a “Learn to Meal Plan” workshop happening on the 27^th and 28^th of this October! The workshop is a place where you can talk to a peer educator and they help you make a custom meal plan for a week based on your needs and by using Canada’s Food Guide!

If you guys have any tips to add or have a different perspective on what leads to a better life in general, I’m curious to know! Just leave it in the comment box below and I’ll be sure to reply ASAP. Until next week readers! 

Peace and Love.

Moiz Maqsood

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