What Should I Be Eating?

Another key aspect of achieving physical wellness is your diet. While in previous blog posts I have stressed the importance of engaging in physical activity to increase your physical wellness, diet also plays a key role in this in process and is paramount to achieving your goals. If you run a mile on a treadmill and then go eat 1000 calories of fries and ice cream at the dining hall, it’d be hard to see the weight loss or muscle gain that you hope you’d see from exercising. Similarly to working out, there is no one diet that works for everyone and it is up to you to see what your body can tolerate. The most important part of creating a good diet is evaluating your weaknesses when it comes to what you eat on a daily basis. I know I am a sucker for the potato fries at Scott, so I limit myself to only eating them 2-3 times a week. Likewise, if you find yourself often making unhealthy choices at the dining halls or eating fast food frequently you should begin to think about how you can cut down and still remain content with what you are eating. A good strategy to begin this process is to keep a food journal and track what you eat throughout a typical week. Using https://dining.osu.edu/wellness/ is a great way to calculate all the calories you normally consume and you may find the things that you thought were healthy actually aren’t. Likewise, you can use this analysis to see if perhaps your diet is very high in sugar or fats or if there are food groups that you totally neglect in your normal diet. If you hate vegetables like I do, try to slowly incorporate them into your diet perhaps 2-3 times a week until you can tolerate more. Again, starting slow is the key to success as if you say that you will cut out everything bad from your diet and start a diet of fruits, vegetables, and lean meat you are bound to end up quitting and often end up unhappy in the process. Transitioning slowly into a good diet that includes a variety of different greens, meats, and fruits is the best option to really get the most bang for your buck and maximize weight loss and muscle growth.