Are you Truly Healthy?
By: Emily Bowman
Have you ever asked yourself if you are truly healthy? Here is a way of thinking through it. Ask yourself if you are constantly tired, if you are always hungry or never hungry, or if you eat a whole bunch of candy or sugar, otherwise known as “junk food.” To answer these questions, you must know yourself and what you think about when you say you are hungry.
Someone once said that your stomach is like a fire. You start with kindling and work your way up to a big fire, but you must slowly add wood on because if you have a small fire and then immediately put logs on it, it will go out. But if you slowly work your way up to a big fire it is healthy and will last much longer. The fire represents energy. If your fire goes out, you have lost your energy.
People say you should have 3 big meals a day but really you should have 5 small meals a day. Going back to the fire analogy, if you have a big breakfast with a whole bunch of bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, and a big glass of 2 percent milk and you ate in it 15 minutes, and then you go and jog like you do every morning, you will most likely get a sideache. This is because you put so much in your stomach that it didn’t digest yet and you are forcing it to work faster then it does. Then you come home again and you don’t feel good and you are tired. In other words, you put out your fire. But some people think they probably don’t feel good because they are hungry so they eat more. This is why there are more and more people in America are obese. People eat so much that they put out their fires and get tired because their fire was their energy, but when they wake up from a nap they are hungry again, and start the cycle over again.
The secret to a healthy lifestyle is not to go on some starvation diet, because that is another thing people in America don’t know - you need to gain weight to lose weight. When you eat, calories take body fat with them when you work off calories. If you eat 5 small meals and stay active you will be the healthiest person there is, but if you think you are hungry but you are not and you eat a whole bunch of food then you put out your energy. Some people might drink an energy drink but then they are even more tired when it wears off. Then your whole life style changes because you don’t know when you are tired and when you are hungry, so you eat when you feel tired, which for most people, is very often.