Reflection piece-

I really enjoyed the presentation by Ben from the health center about different aspects of a healthy lifestyle, including diet and exercise. He targeted things like what a balanced diet should consist of daily, how you can incorporate those into prepared meals at home instead of eating out, healthy options for grocery shopping, fun ways to exercise, and other tips that make living a healthy lifestyle an easy and attainable option.

His presentation interested me because he took a different approach to talking about healthy choices than do most that would be giving this presentation. He emphasized that it should be fun and not a chore to eat and exercise whereas a lot of people present it as an obligation that is just a part of life. He made the goal of a healthy lifestyle attainable because he discussed goal setting, and how to take it slowly. By making small goals, such as prepare meals at home and exercise two times a week, you can increase your amount of healthy options slowly instead of jumping right into commitments you won’t keep. I like that he emphasized that any progress is progress and even if your goals are small, it’s better than nothing.

This topic affected my life personally because it put into place a little planning, that I usually lack. By noting that I was going to make dinner at home certain nights, that would mean I would have to plan to go grocery shopping before then, and in order to plan that you would have to plan around classes, studying, and other obligations. So the planning somewhat built upon each other, then I would find times to fill in with exercise on top of that. While it sounds tedious, it was nice to have a little structure and accountability. It also affected my social life because a couple times my roommate and I would cook together and make a meal, which was a fun activity to do together instead of just going out to eat together.

This topic is important to public health because people should be aware of how easy it is to take control of your unhealthy lifestyle, and you can start and restart anytime. I think a lot of people just feel overwhelmed and scared about the idea of change, because it seems like a daunting task to overcome. This is why it’s important to promote small changes to create healthy habits, because it is a very doable task. More people, like Ben, should promote the ease and fun aspect of being healthy, instead of just talking about the bad side effects and obligation of it all, that shames people into diet and exercise.

A question I have surrounding this topic would be what are the major reasons and excuses people make for not leading a simple healthy lifestyles and how health promoters can combat those specific problems?