Benjamin’s Musings

Weight Loss in the New Year

I hate holidays.  They give me time off to reflect on my life, how far I’ve come, and where I am.  The idea of New Years resolutions come to mind.  Especially the fact that I’ve never made any.  Since college is a time of new beginnings and growing, I thought that I would try my hand at attempting to better myself.  One of the goals that I set for myself is weight loss.  I recently watched the movie ‘King Corn’, in which two men from Boston move to Iowa in order to discover where the food that they eat comes from. They then decide to grow 1 acre of corn to find out what being a farmer is like, and finally see where their corn goes.  They discover at the end of the film that their corn is actually a product that is produced for maximum quantity, and as such contains very low actual nutritional value.  The primary use of their corn is to be extracted into corn syrup. After seeing this movie, I went out to find out how unhealthy high fructose corn syrup is for ingestion.

For my weight loss plan this year, I plan to stop ingesting foods and beverages that are high in corn syrup, including sodas, frozen foods, and candies.  I also realized that the key to losing weight is not so much all the calories that you consume during the day, but how you expend them.  Many calories are not burned sitting around, so I’ve decided to take some extra measures to make sure that my 2500-3000 calorie per day diet is used well.  To this end, I plan on exercising more this year.  Oregon State University has an exercise center called Dixon Recreation Center, and it’s free to all enrolled students(which includes me!).  I also plan on doing some stealth-exercising by buying some ankle weights or boot weights, some wrist weights, and some thigh weights, and wearing them in my day-to-day activities.  This way I can exercise without taking time out of my day.

I hate holidays.  Being away from home at college is difficult.  Not only do I miss my parents and the rest of my family, I am a couple states away and unable to afford a plane ticket home to visit them.  Clearly, this would be an opportune time for my girlfriend to dump me, so that is exactly what occurred.  That means that I have to find other people to spend my holidays with.  It turns out that international students work well.  This year I spent it with a girlfriend of mine.  She happens to live in an international house and because her parents are crazy, she didn’t have anybody to spend the holidays with either.  So I brought a Christmas feast, and we enjoyed our holiday together!  Maybe I’ll eat less ham next year too.