This week, I’ve decided to discuss a topic that’s been revolutionary in my personal life: health. Health -- daily eating habits, self-love, and the treatment of our individual bodies -- has always been tricky to discuss. Where does one even start in a society that has brainwashed almost every teenage girl to work towards an ideal that is unrealistic? Due to the media and practically every culture I had witnessed, the need to achieve society’s standard of perfection had been instilled in me so deeply that I forgot to be gentle with myself.

The lack of knowledge on what is realistic, and what is completely Photoshopped left me tangled in the mess of a hypocritical portrayal of the ideal American. Turn on the television and the first advertisement is definitely some sort of fast food, or maybe Red Lobster’s tempting combo platters, buttered and sizzling in oil. This would definitely be followed by a plastic looking, doll-faced actress promoting Neutrogena for clear skin. Maybe when I sat in front of the television, helplessly trying to balance my life between both of these commercials, I couldn’t pinpoint the correlation between the two. At the time, I definitely didn’t know that unhealthy eating lead to acne, that this was just one teeny tiny trick that sucked us all into the cycle of consumership. Now I know this, but I think the reality of it hit me when I heard a student at Seattle University from the year above me talk about an empowering journey in her life. She spoke of how her mind and her body related to each other so closely. They were intertwined far more than she thought. After telling me that what she put in her body affected how happy she felt on the whole, I was determined to know what she was putting in her body. How could she feel so happy on the whole, while I was tackling my freshman year of college, absolutely lost among the selection of cafeteria junk, which only offered temporary gratification? This was perhaps the first step to realizing that a change needed to be made. But it took me two more years to actually make it. (When your scholarship provides you with a meal plan to sushi and a wok, it’s hard to pick anything else).

I made other positive changes, though. I stopped drinking soda and I realized how dramatically it changed everything. At first I was always tired. The caffeine withdrawal couldn’t be ameliorated with a cup of coffee because I detested coffee. So while all my friends drank Seattle’s constant offering, I tried to acquaint myself with tea. It didn’t help much, either; most often, it just got me in a bedtime mood. Either way, I had read enough articles and learned enough about the terrible effects of soda on my body to continue drinking it. My yoga teacher’s words remained in my head -- that it takes 21 days to break a habit. I don’t know how true this is for me, because sometimes I still crave that can of Pepsi with french fries, but for 21 days I remained determined. After that cycle ended, it recommenced -- 21 more days, followed by 21 more days. I just had to break the habit over and over again, until it was mentally instilled. Then, one day, the 21-day cycle didn’t exist, because the habit had actually been broken.

Even after turning around my eating habits and feeling better on the whole, I still had cravings (we all do). I still wanted to grab an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s and sit in front of a large screen TV with my best friend and binge on Bollywood. Sometimes, I wanted to do this every day for a week. That’s when the words of my French professor resounded in my head the most. “Yeah, sure, eat whatever you want -- just work it off.”

The journey, on the whole, was overwhelming. I took so long to start eating healthy, and it took even longer to find out how to enjoy it -- now you want me to move? Not everyone is born and raised with the will, and wants to work out. I had always been one of the couch potatoes. Unless it was a dance party, I didn’t want to move. This was the dip. Right after peaking with all these positive life changes, I once again felt like I’d fallen into a slump. But after much reflection internally, and through conversation with peers, I learned that I had not given myself enough credit. It’s a flaw in a lot of us, actually. But once you learn to give yourself credit for what’s been achieved, everything starts looking up.

You’ll learn that after setting one goal, just one, and after completing it, everything else gets easier (if you’ve given yourself credit). Once you have one accomplishment to look at, you can train your mind to want to add to the pile. But the trick is not to set an unachievable goal. I learned that one the hard way. You can’t wake up in the morning and expect to run miles every day. That one took me a century to do. That one, I’m still working on. One of my Seattle University advisors actually told me that I had to set achievable goals. If you knew for a fact that the goal was so easy there wouldn’t be any way you couldn’t fulfill it, you would have more to offer yourself. More positivity, more focus, and more motivation for the next goal.

I understand that everyone’s journey is different, but I’ve seen enough diet fads (and partaken in too many) to leave it at that. In my personal journey, the harder part was not leaving the soda in the vending machine, rather turning off the television so that I could quit idolizing an ideal that does not exist. Participating in the 21-day cycle over and over again, was more mental than physical. It did not include gentleness with oneself.

I want people to know that besides making the dramatic changes in what you eat, or how much you work out, or how aware you are of the media and society’s influence on you, because sometimes that’s asking for too much, a lot of the journey is purely mental. Sometimes the hardest part of the journey is in recognizing how much you’ve done for yourself, just by wanting to create a positive change.