There are so many distractions, especially as college students that take us off track from a healthy lifestyle. Work, internships, social life, college parties, etc. Could our busy life style, lack of exercise, and poor diet be leading us down to a path of destruction? This is so important to address because as a future healthy lifestyle advocate and nurse, its important for me to stop or reduce a future crisis. Cancer!! We are all scared of it, in fact we probably choose not to think about it. College life is stressful! I would be the first to attest to that, and sometimes the habits we pick up a long the way can be detrimental to us later. Lets start with smoking, According to the website {http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/02/20/female-cancer-survivors-report-worse-health-habits-survey}, female cancer survivors are more likely to smoke and have unhealthy behaviors than women who have never had cancer. Smoking is a death sentence, and yes we have so much stress from assignments, tests, work, and life in general which can get overwhelming at times. We really need to tap into some other anti stress activities that do not affect us as bad as smoking does. Every day of the week there is a party!! After a long week of studying you might feel like it would be so nice to go have a couple drinks with your friends and take a load off. Moderation is definitely the key because frequent drinkers actually double their risk for cancer. If you choose to drink, make sure that is is not every day because not only is it bad for your health, and just extra calories that we do not need, it is also increasing your cancer risk at the same time. The freshman 15! How we hate those words, but it does happen, it might even be the freshman 50. It is not uncommon to pack on the weight during the first year of college because of stress, change in environment, drinking, and poor food choices. The freshman 15 is an amount of weight that can be lost easily and it is so important not to carry this weight over to a lifestyle of limited physical activity and poor food choices. Those individuals who are overweight and obese have a much higher breast cancer risk than woman of normal weight. Life can still be enjoyable ladies, but make sure you do not do things in excess. Working out feels so amazing and it has sooooo many benefits from anti stress, to lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, to also lowering cancer risk. The main thing I want you ladies to take a way from this blog is to make these changes now so that you do not regret them later. Eat healthy and stay in your correct weight class! I mean we all love to shop and look beautiful to live up to your potential. Eat fruits, and vegetables, incorporate whole grains and lean meats into your diet. Try it and you will not only look better but feel better. I want all of us as women to be advocates for our health, lets defeat breast cancer and all cancers! So whose with me???!
by Erin Berry
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