New Year’s resolutions are in full swing, and spring break is quickly approaching. At the same time, the Turner Center is overcrowded, and salads are in demand everywhere. The sad thing is that by the time spring break is over, the Turner Center will return to normal, and Ajax will once again be full. The community’s sudden interest in health and wellness will come to a screeching halt.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over one-third of American adults are obese. Unsurprisingly, Mississippi leads the CDC’s list of most obese states. Further, Mississippi is consistently ranked the unhealthiest state in the nation, according to reports from America’s Health Rankings. Along with obesity, diabetes and a lack of physical activity are major problems in the state.
We can combat our state’s and our nation’s continual health issue by breaking down the trend we see right here on our campus — fad dieting and exercise, as opposed to sustainable lifestyle changes.
Living a healthy lifestyle and being fit aren’t about moving from one extreme diet to the next. A healthy lifestyle involves serious commitment and openness to making major, lifelong changes to your eating and exercise habits. In fact, a recent study conducted in Great Britain found that just cutting out one nutrient — like carbs or fats — is actually detrimental to your overall health. This is something we see in fad diets every year.
British twins and doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken conducted an experiment in which one gave up fat and the other gave up carbs. They found that their diets, and similar ones, were not the answer to healthy weight loss. In fact, what they found was that moderation in your diet and cutting out heavily processed foods were much more important than working to eliminate one specific nutrient. Frankly, giving up one major food group is difficult, if not impossible. If you starve yourself of one thing long enough, eventually, you’ll find yourself binging on that very thing. Moderation is key.
While I don’t have a degree in nutrition and dietetics, and I don’t study science, I do have life experience in the field. By making sustainable changes to my own diet and exercise patterns, I lost 50 pounds over the course of a year to create a healthier lifestyle for myself. I continue to work on my lifestyle choices, working to eat less processed foods and cook for myself more. Unlike other diets, the changes I’ve made to my life are ones that I will stick with. Sure, I still eat pasta, donuts, hamburgers and pizza. But, I eat those things much less frequently than I used to, and I work to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. In the beginning, the goal was to lose weight. Now, I do those things because my body feels better, and I feel better. I know that these lifestyle changes are adding years to my life — something a fad diet could never do.
We need to stop the fad dieting and the random acts of extreme exercise found around spring break. We need to live lives that include a well-balanced diet and daily physical activity. Health and wellness are about more than looking good; they’re about feeling good, too. Now’s the time to create a lifestyle that will lead to many healthy years in the future. Now’s the time to end the obesity epidemic that plagues America. This new life starts with sustainable changes to your diet and exercise regime, not extreme dieting.
Adam Blackwell is a senior public policy leadership major from Natchez.
