What time did you wake up this morning? Unless you’ve got the morning shift or ROTC personal training, I’ll bet it wasn’t before daybreak. What about your homework? How’s that final project due at the end of the semester coming along? I’d wager you haven’t even opened the assignment. And your love life? Dare I ask? 

If you feel behind, overworked and overdone, you probably need to give your body what it needs: a break. But that’s not going to happen, at least not until December. So, give your body the other things it needs, like adequate nutrition. Like, now. 

“All disease begins in the gut,” Hippocrates famously stated some 2000 years ago. You are what you eat, after all. Hippocrates, like modern medicine, understood a happy gut can break down foods to power a happy body. A stressed gut, on the other hand, can only lead to problems for the whole system. 

You probably experience this every day. A nutrient-dense breakfast will keep you less hungry and more focused than a doughnut will. Why? Because, a doughnut is nothing but a sugar ball. Simple carbohydrates are exactly that: simple. Too easy to absorb for your body to get any lasting energy from it. 

Most us know why we don’t eat as well as we’d like. After a full day of classes, projects and work, who wants to come home and whip up a healthy masterpiece? Enter junk food. Quick, convenient and detrimental. 

Anyone can make time for a wrapped bar. Fast food is at every corner on campus, but that kind of food doesn’t really satisfy you. It’s a trick. Fat food, as I call it, makes you more irritable and hungrier, and that starts the process over again. It’s a vicious cycle. But to break that cycle is to save your gut. And the gut, we know, is your second brain. This isn’t just for your physical health; it’s for your survival.

Healthy food isn’t just for the yoga crowd anymore. Hang around the ARC long enough and you’ll bump into weightlifters cutting carbs, frat boys going keto and runners ditching sugary drinks. 

Everyone benefits from a lifetime of proper eating; tribes are irrelevant. We truly are blessed to live in a country with such abundant food reserves. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t using them to our advantage. I say, be selfish. Take the broccoli over the fries. It’ll do you better in the long run. Who doesn’t want to be happier, healthier and more productive? When you start to view food as what it is — medicine — you can.

Mark is a junior in ACES.

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