College has been a tough time for my body. Being in shape and eating healthy has never been this hard. I try, but promptly every time I'm stressed out, or I'm staying up late studying, I end up eating the calories of an entire week in snacks. For example, the best way to make myself keep studying is putting an M&M at the end of each paragraph as an incentive for me to keep reading in order to get to eat it. You can easily imagine that this highly successful method for learning is very counterproductive to not gaining weight.
Week after week, I realized how much food is humoral for me, how it fills up all the empty spaces in my time (and maybe in my life too). If I'm busy I can forget about eating for hours, but if I'm bored that's when food is the first thing that comes to my mind. It's a little sad, I guess, but I'm definitely not alone in this attitude towards food. As the famous "freshman 15" are hitting hard all around me and I try to go to the gym consistently without much success. I had to come up with survival plans to make my obsession for food good, somehow. I realized food was becoming too central in my life in an unhealthy way. I was checking in all the calories I was eating in a day, stressing out for each single one, but then I would eat more calories than I set for the day and feel so bad. I realized I had to change before this circle of eating and then blaming myself for having eaten would suffocate me.
That's how I started caring more about my food. I take pictures of what eat and instead of picking up random food while walking through the lines of the refectory, I try for it to be pretty or artsy so that I could take nice pictures of it. This habit actually helped me more than once not eating just to fill up myself, but actually choosing my food carefully. It makes me feel more like at home, where every meal was important -- a moment shared with the family, but also a nice mix of good ingredients that took my mom time (and love) to cook. Also, I started working in the kitchen, in the bakeshop and in the two main dining halls here on campus in order to get closer to food, but in a healthier way. Working with people who are actually passionate chefs helps me understand what makes students fat during freshman year: they think that the food in college is bad, but they don't stop thinking about the fact that also those muffins they eat as a snack were made one by one by workers who come in
