Staying fit over the summer is a much harder challenge than it probably should be. After working hard all school year to stay healthy (rock climbing basically everyday, eating pretty healthy, even signing up for an 8am workout class which I’m still not sure how I ended up in), the transition into summer was unusually hard hitting on my physical fitness. I spent 3 months back in Chicago, which my grandfather took as his free pass for eating at as many hotdog places as he could think of to show his granddaughter. From my experiences in the city, it is really easy to get bogged down with a whole lot of unhealthy foods and not a lot of physical activity outside of walking. When you are constantly on the go, going from one place to another while allowing at least an hour to get anywhere with public transportation, it is much easier to grab something from the Noodles and Co. underneath the train station after a long day rather than having to walk another two miles to the grocery store and then cook a meal for one. Unfortunately this trend seems to be pretty common which I think is really detrimental to Chicagoans. Ironically, I walked more than in three months than I did for an entire year because I didn’t not have a car and public transit was not always very close or convenient from where I was living. A huge misconception with the new trend of FitBits, Apple Watches, etc. is that walking 10,000 steps will result in a skinnier, fitter “you” which is definitely not the case. That usually just makes your feet hurt. Diet, stress level, actually working out, and a healthy mind are important things to focus on as well. Stress levels seem to sky rocket in city people. This might just be my perception or experience but people do not seem as relaxed as they are even in Austin. Public transit, however convenient it might be, is stressful. When a specific bus only comes every 25 minutes and you have to be at a doctors appointment downtown and you are trying to get a 6 month old, a stroller, and yourself onto said crammed bus or else you might miss the only appointment time available, stress levels soar (hint: personal experience.) Like it is noted in The Story of The Human Body, “there was no single environment for which the human body evolved” (location 350). Every environment in the world today has some aspect that was not originally suitable for the first humans. These high stress city lifestyles were not the intended environments for people, which is why it can be so stressful on the body. Something I realized while living in Chicago is that environment matters. Where you live, how you interact with the environment, and how your body responds makes a difference in your mental health. Summers in the city are a lot different than winters, and seasonal depression is a real thing. When it’s -50 degrees Fahrenheit, your only option is low quality dorm food, and the gym is a mile away (and we all know no one is going outside in that weather), both physical and mental health both decline immensely. Luckily that period of my life is over and my time living in Chicago will probably be limited to summers, but I now understand how people can become extremely unhealthy in that environment. Obviously not everyone in Chicago is unhealthy. That is definitely not the case, but I think it is a factor of convenience and money that greatly changes people’s drive to be active in these kinds of settings. A cheap, fast meal from a fast food restaurant on the corner of Belmont and Broadway (ironically across from my gym) is a lot easier than growing your own food in a garden (which I have noticed a lot of in France) or buying more expensive, healthy food to cook for yourself. Clearly that is the lazy option, but I really do believe that a huge amount of Americans live this way. In Chicago and other largely populated areas with a lot of demand, the price of food is really high. There was one salad bar that I would go to quite often where I could buy a pretty big salad that would fill me up but also drain my wallet. One salad would usually end up being about $12! That is without adding protein since it always costs extra and a drink. Imagine how much that would add up to… I think that is a huge factor in the diet issues of America. You can buy an entire large pizza at Pizza Hut for around $12 ($15 including delivery if you are feeling especially privileged) OR you can buy a single serving salad for the same price. A study has shown that “the cost of substituting healthier foods can cost up to 35-40% of an American low-income family’s food budget” (Darmon and Drewnoski). There are so many problems with that. Specifically relating that back to Chicago, there is a huge amount of poverty in many parts of the city. While that part didn’t relate directly to me, it does effect a huge amount of the population and that is something we need to pay attention to. A lot of low income neighborhoods are in what we call “food deserts” where there is “limited access to healthy food but numerous fast-food outlets” (Woolf and Braveman). If people are only concerned with what directly effects them personally, progress will never be made on anything. If healthy foods were more affordable, people wouldn’t have to resort to cheap fast food or packaged processed foods. Granted, so much of the problem lies within the issue of portion control and self control. People are interesting because like the Medical Anthropology text notes, “organisms eat primarily to get energy to fuel their metabolic and activity requirements” (76) but we tend to like to eat for pure pleasure a lot of the time. Chicago has so many good restaurants to choose from and I’m definitely guilty of finding the good ones and eating just because it’s there. On the flip side, I will note that there are a lot of gyms all over the city that give pretty good student discounts. Once my bank account had a little cushion from working for a few weeks, I made the choice to spend a little extra on better quality, healthy foods and a gym membership. Very worth it. It’s amazing how much of a difference diet and exercise makes. Gyms in Chicago are usually pretty crowded, but are the people in them just the ones who can afford the pricey salads after their spin class? When does health stop being something you pay for and instead become something of universal importance ingrained into society?
Darmon, Nicole, and Adam Drewnowski. “Does Social Class Predit Diet Quality?” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Print.
Lieberman, Daniel. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon, 2013. Print.
Wiley, Andrea S., and John S. Allen. Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Woolf, Steven H. and Paula Braveman. “Where Health Disparities Begin: The Role of Social an Economic Determinants- And Why Current Policies Make Matters Worse.” http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/30/10/1852.full