By Brittany Burke
It is never a bad thing to live a healthy lifestyle, but when living in a college dorm staying fit and healthy may not always be the easiest thing to keep up with. Not when pasta and chicken patties are a staple on the cafeteria menu and some weeks you’re too busy to see the inside of a gym; and weekly alcohol consumption may not be the best thing either.
However, despite how hard some may think being healthy is, it really isn’t, and the staff of RECentral is challenging the entire student body this year to try and see just how simple a healthy lifestyle can be.
In late October, RECentral will be launching a new campus-wide program entitled the RECentral Healthy Lifestyle Challenge.
This is a weekly program which teaches students what it means to be healthy. “Every week we are going to challenge the students, faculty and staff to do something to benefit themselves as part of a healthy lifestyle,” said Ken DeStefanis, RECentral’s recreation specialist.
“So for instance, one of our challenges may be eat a healthy breakfast every morning [one] week and we’ll talk about the benefits of a healthy breakfast, your energy levels, we’ll talk about the benefits of things like oatmeal and yogurt, cereal, which cereal to avoid because of a high sugar content, the benefits of some of fruit you put in your yogurt or oatmeal or cereal, the antioxidants you get from your blueberries; the benefits from eating bananas, the vitamins and potassium [things of that nature.]”
The idea is to help jumpstart people into a better way of living. If someone at CCSU does participate in the weekly challenges they will be eligible to win a prize, some sort of giveaway, at the end of each week.
In order to win the prize the student or CCSU faculty member would have to email RECentral to let the staff know that they did in fact take on the challenge for that week.
“At the end of every week we’ll give out two prizes,” said DeStefanis. “Once people have taken the healthy lifestyle challenge for that week they’ll email us saying that they did participate, and took the challenge, and those names will be put in a hat and, well, pick a name. The second prize will be if someone went a little bit out of the ordinary and actually sent us a photo of their breakfast every morning with a little blurb saying ‘Oh geez, I never had blueberries before. I didn’t know they were so great for you and the health benefits were so great,’ and so if someone goes above and beyond we’ll choose that second person.”
The lifestyle challenges will be a mix of eating healthy and exercising. Another challenge may be to attend some of the fitness classes offered each week by RECentral, or to visit one of the three fitness centers on campus. If someone already is living a healthy lifestyle, this challenge can only improve what they are already doing, so there is something for everyone.
While there will be weekly prizes given out, the challenge isn’t about giveaways, it is about improving the way you live so you can lead a better, healthier life.
