I’ve struggled with nutrition my entire life. It started on one spectrum, where all I would eat was either pizza or pizza rolls. For years, I lived off take-out and frozen food and I stress-ate whenever I had to get through a particularly rough patch in high school. Then, when I got to college, it shifted to the other end and I developed an relatively unknown eating disorder called orthorexia, or an obsession with healthy eating to the point of restriction. Now, I’m practicing a healthier balance between the two, which is why nutrition is unbelievably important to me. Unfortunately, it’s also extremely hard to maintain in college. I see so many of my friends skipping meals or only eating what’s available, which is often not very filling but loaded with unhealthy ingredients. Under the “make” page of this site is also an index of recipes that I’ve followed as I’ve gotten to Georgetown. It’s been my way of maintaining a healthy lifestyle with limited ingredients and materials. However, sometimes the biggest barrier to nutrition is not the physical aspects but the mental. Having to face my orthorexia as we learned about nutrition in Flourishing was a wake-up call. It made me come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t living as healthy as I had thought, which compelled me to change for the better. That’s what it starts with: being aware of our own unhealthy habits.
How are you practicing nutrition? How can you realistically improve it?
