The past couple of months has definitely been tough for me because all the personal stuff that has been going on in my life and all the adjustments that has happened in the past two months. Unfortunately, the one thing that has been there for me is alcohol. Every time I was feeling down or lonely, I decided to drink and even though it feels good at the moment and it helps me stress less about what is going on in my head, it is only for a short term. Because of the way that I been drinking and would definitely consider myself engaging in binge drinking. Actually, when I read about it, I was like “yup, that definitely me right now”. It is scary and surprising how much damage can happen from binge drinking, it really makes me thing if this is worth doing. Fortunately, in the past couple of days and since the corona virus, I been focusing on myself and working on my emotions instead of drinking to avoid facing the problem. I been also being back to working out consistency and because I know how bad alcohol is, I been reducing them so I can actually see the progress of my workouts and my meals.
The second topic that really called my attention was that an extra 150 calories in alcohol a day would increase your weight by 12 pounds in a year. When I was reading this I was like “150 calories is literally nothing” but a woman going from 140 to 152 would definitely be noticeable, especially since it is literally just fat. I think this is why we see how so many college students gain weight so easily. I moved to South Carolina a little over 8 months ago and I meet this group of friends who have their own apartment and go out from Thursday to Sunday every week. When I saw their pictures from a year or two or three years ago, you can see that every year they gain more and more weight to the point where they went from weighting 140-150 to probably being closed to 200 pounds. There is a lot that goes on not staying at home when you go to college and like the chapter mentions, peer pressure and stress is definitely key of why college students can drink excessively. I always thought that the reason why college students usually gain weight is because they don’t work out as often and the college food is not the healthiest. However, after reading this chapter and thinking about it a little more deeply, everyone who goes to college walks a lot, or at least I did when I had all my classes on campus and even though the eating can sometimes not be the best, alcohol is straight up empty calories. There is not one nutrient that alcohol gives to our bodies but calories making it really easily to gain weight.
The last thing that I found interesting in the chapter was how to avoid or decrease our intake in alcohol. I think that having juice or water in between is a smart idea to just reduce how much and fast we drink. I think what often happens is that we drink so much and so fast that we get wasted easily. Another really interesting fact for me that actually really works was not keeping alcohol at home unless I am actually going to drink it that day. I moved out of my boyfriend’s house over a month ago. We always had alcohol and we used to drink a beer or two at night sometimes. However, when I moved out and had alcohol in my apartment, because I was sad and overwhelmed, I was drinking a whole bottle of wine, something that I did not do as his house even if I had the alcohol because I was able to control myself and think about all the calories and the consequences of drinking would do in my body, I was really not interested on drinking so much because it would ruin my muscle gain progress. However, when I felt down, I did not care, I was drinking and just regretting the next day. So i decided that the best way to avoid this was to not have alcohol at home, because even if I really wanted it one night, I was most likely not going to go out of my house to get alcohol. Also, comparing the calories of drinking vs eating something else that I liked helped me weight if alcohol was worth it or not.
I think this week I started with a fresh start, focusing on my goals and what I want to accomplish by this summer. I know I had my bad times and alcohol definitely the first thing I thought to do to make me feel better, this week I decided to focus and maintain my goals, as well as taking it one day at a time and understand the “why” I will do something and “why” I should not do it. I really liked this chapter and I think it had a lot of interesting information and it also came at the right time for me.
Environmental Health 