Proper nutrition: mission (im)possible?
Nowadays it is very common to hear such a popular topic that is “proper nutrition”. Everywhere people discuss various aspects of healthy diet and sometimes they ridicule it: starting their discussions from pseudo-science blogs and ends it with songs of “Leningrad” band. Unfortunately, such misinformation and credulity of unrealiable sources may be harmful. People will have misconceptions about the proper goal of a healthy lifestyle which may lead to distortion of expected results and eventually causing them neglect their goals.
Healthy lifestyle is a form of self-care.
Healthy lifestyle doesn’t mean turning yourself into a Spartan with a strict diet and daily exhausting physical trainings. This lifestyle is individual and it doesn’t only depends on ones’s desire but also their physical capabilities.
There is such an abstract phrase “You are what you eat” that everyone understands. Frankly speaking, healthy diet is the most accessible part of healthy lifestyle. There are so many projects on healthy diet which students and professors of KSMU have been managing.
There is Centre for Nutrition at Pharmacology building where you can try delicious and healthy food with reasonable prices, information about calories and other important details for each meal.
The importance of proper nutrition is encouraged by management of KSMU and student projects. Recently the project “Hercules” was awarded as the best volunteering project among all higher education institutions of Kursk in 2019.
The members of the volunteering project “Hercules” have been proving and sharing their knowledge with people of various ages that eating healthy food could be fun, exciting and definitely not a burden.
Maxim Drannikov, chief of the project, explained a simple yet necessary secrets of the basics of proper nutrition and gave us clear examples. “Energy balance should not only be about calculating the amount of calories spent for sports, walking to university, eating a bun at canteen and so on. But also the amount of calories which your organism spends for pushing blood through vessels, filtration process and so on. Calories are the unit of energy which people obtain from food. Without it the organism would’nt work. Energy balance is essential for an organism to perform any vital activity. According to basics of proper nutrition, the proportion of proteins to fats to carbohydrates should be 1:1:4 for adults of low-physical activity, and 1:1:5 at high-physical activity”.
Maxim shares tips and advices which would help to fix your eating habits, but also to normalize life-rhythms, improving overall health.
It’s necessary to:
- Eat 3 or 4 times per day;
- Eat regularly at the same time;
- Have a balanced diet;
- Last meal should be at least 3 hours bedtime;
- Prefer the boiled, baked meals or steamed methods of cooking foods.
You should not only eat dry food; your diet should contain soups. It’s important to remember to drink water: at least 1,5 litres per day, avoid gassy drinks and reduce the intake of strong black and green tea, coffee.
If you’re in doubts of the ways of cooking and storage of food at bars and canteens, just avoid those places.
Remember about the food regime — good intake daily and at the same time (it normalizes stomach acid). Pauses between meals should not be over 3–4 hours. Foods should be chewed well. Foods neither be hot, nor cold. A wise decision is to stop drinking alcohol and smoking which irritates the mucous membranes.
Useful advices, of course its good. But what to do if daily regime or stress can vary unpredictably? How can students eat properly if they live in dormitories?
Being born in Kursk, I haven’t been challenged by such experience. I’ve pondered over this issue after hearing from my friends’ experience in dorms.
The devils of proper nutrition in dormitories:
- 25th hour syndrome: Hardly having energy to rest after classes and homework, so you forget about cooking a normal meal.
- Endless stress. To have a tasty but unhealthy snack always help to relieve stress but useless in terms of nutrition.
- Being a part of a company: to commit a sin with fast-food is easier with people around.
The strategies to approaching proper nutrition at dormitory:
- Self-teaching. Carefully study the issue of healthy nutrition alone and using proved sources (watch video-blogs as a way to understand easier). It’s highly recommended to get a consultation from a nutritionist to set an individual plan for healthy nutrition.
- If you criticize, then give your idea. Be that example of a healthy food consumer for your neighbors. Encourage them to set a proper daily regime (waking up, sleeping and eating time).
- One man on the field is not a warrior. Sin with your roomates with fruits and nuts instead of crackers and sodas, and simultaneously argue constructively and rationally for each other’s failures (but not in a fanatic way, but rather in a friendly atmosphere). Only then your ‘fighting spirit’ can be spread across different rooms and floors.
“Difficult but possible” is an unofficial motto for a healthy nutrition. The times spent at University is the final stage to form the inner culture of a human and the manner healthy eating is part of an individual culture.
text Daria Kasyanova
edited by Samraj Shiraz
