Though being taught from a young age, students in late middle school to high school may still struggle in finding the right balance to a healthy diet and exercise routine.
It’s no secret that nutrition is one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. With the development during adolescence both affecting physical health and brain function, a proper diet is extremely important during one’s late middle school and high school years.
Athletic Enhancement instructor Ben Zizis explained that nutrition, along with fitness go hand in hand when one wants to start focusing on their health more significantly. He explained that a mistake that is regularly made is “[d]oing what is easy.” Easy meaning consuming foods and drinks that are known to be unhealthy in great amounts for teens such as energy drinks, surgery foods and fast foods.
Though if it becomes an everyday and/or even a multiple times a day situation the consumption of these and or similar foods/drinks may lead to an unhealthy lifestyle, there is no reason not to treat yourself once in a while. There is a difference between health and deprivation that one must find the balance of.
Dietitian Lindsay Pleskot explained that “food has an incredible ability to nourish us physically but it is also here to bring joy and satisfaction to our lives.” Furthermore, Pleskot noted that by limiting to only a certain food or certain amounts of food that one unintentionally creates an unhealthy relationship with not only food, but an unhealthy lifestyle.
While it is important to know what foods are more unhealthy than others, it is equally as important to understand that just because some food is unhealthy it is not inherently a “bad food.”
Zizis explained that in order to start focusing on their nutrition they should emplace small goals and work their way up to bigger ones. “If you reach for the moon you are more likely to give up,” he expressed.
