Eating Healthy in Honor of National Nutrition Month
Image credit: Pixabay
My first instinct is to reach out and grab the foiled package of bacon on the top shelf, my hands just barely reaching it. Right next to the shelf, there’s a perfect row of bananas, colored to my liking: vibrant, bright yellow with a tinge of green at the ends. An elderly woman with glasses dangling from her neck shuffles by, mutters a quiet “excuse me,” and picks up a bundle of bananas to place in her cart next to a pack of chia seeds.
It almost seems like my coming to Safeway to buy bacon is being frowned upon by the woman’s shopping cart holding what presumably looks like healthy foods. A variety of fruits — apples, pears, oranges and now bananas — cuddle closely next to two loaves of bread, a gallon of milk and a carton of iced tea.
While I’m not someone who purposefully aims to eat healthy, I do try to when given the option. As I stand there, the bacon now safely wrapped in my hand and the bananas fresh in my mind, I decide that this moment presented itself and hastily stuff the bacon back onto the shelf before my desires leap out to protest. The pure bacon crisp, coated with a slight saltiness to top off the flavor, is creeping its way toward the front of my mind. Still, I ignore it.
I have a new mission far opposite of what my original plan was when I got up this morning, craving bacon and realizing that there were only three strips left. My fingers dash at my phone’s keyboard and type out: “What works well with bananas and bread for breakfast?”
My sister responds moments later as I’m rolling the cart toward the dairy and bread aisle: “avocado??”
In contrast to me, my sister aims to have a variety of foods at each meal in order to have a well-balanced diet. Having my sister across the table with her plate of well-mixed salad and fruit smoothie for nearly every lunch while I indulge in the recently delivered pepperoni pizza and breadsticks was never something I took long to analyze. Looking back, I realize that my eating habits need to change, which is often difficult to do on a college campus.
When I asked my dorm mate, government and politics major Ashley Wells, what she does to eat healthy on campus, she said that she “keep[s] away from the fried foods by going to Subway instead or any other place and trying to get to the gym every day.”
Computer engineering major Natalie Brooks also touched upon the difficulty of choosing to eat healthy on campus when the diner is only 10 minutes away from her, but she takes a different approach when approaching healthy foods.
“I make sure my plate looks like a rainbow. When you get a well-balanced plate, there are the carbs like red pizza, the greens like the salads, and so on,” she said, which I thought was an extremely clever way to think about eating healthy.
After picking up some eggs, milk, bread, peanut butter and avocado to settle next to my preferred barely-ripe bananas, I wheel to the checkout line, my new plan for breakfast now settled.
At the checkout, I see the same woman from earlier.
“No bacon?” she questions, gesturing at my near-empty cart, which makes me slightly surprised that she remembered that I was the girl who was blocking her from the bananas. I suddenly wonder if she also noticed me pausing at the shelf for longer than one typically would when shopping for bacon.
“No, I’m trying to eat healthy, starting with breakfast,” I explain.
She takes a moment to look in my cart and thinks for a second before launching into a conversation. When she first met her husband, he was a “junk-eater,” a term she used to apply to his rapid consumption of junk food in every moment of the day when he had nothing better to do. She, however, had started living a vegetarian lifestyle a few years ago. One evening during dinner, she placed a bet that he couldn’t last a week without consuming junk food. It took a lot of work for him to stay consistent with the bet, but every time he came close to failing, she made it her mission to paint an image of an old man living on his couch forever, as if he had become smothered by the bags of salt and vinegar potato chips and wrappers of Hi-Chews. Much to her delight, she says, he stuck to his word and has been laying off of the junk food ever since.
She points at her items in the cart and explains that she made a peanut butter, banana and chia seed toast after reading about the health benefits of that simple combination, and her husband has grown to love it so much that they have it most mornings.
“People have to remember it’s a gradual process, especially if it’s a first time thing,” she said, referring to eating healthfully. "Don’t complicate it. Making these small changes in your everyday eating pattern is what is going to make it long-lasting,” she adds.
She wishes me good luck before the cashier calls for the next person in line, and gives a laugh to say that if her husband could do it then anyone can.
Now, I am much better at picking out not only what is high in nutrition but what I am satisfied with eating because it’s better to make your food enjoyable and flavorful and not just healthy. If, for instance, you don’t particularly enjoy avocado, finding ways to incorporate that into other foods can turn your initial distaste into something that is fun to prepare, delicious to eat and a cause of delight.
