In this episode, I share some of my tips for maintaining a healthy diet and exercise as a graduate student (*from someone who is learning how to be healthier).
Disclaimer: I want to acknowledge that I am a physically able person and so these tips are from someone who does not have any type of disability or chronic illnesses or things like that. I’m sharing from my personal experience and what I have found to help me.
I want to encourage all graduate students to take care of their physical health while they’re in grad school and not to neglect it, in any way that they can wherever they are at. I learned that after a certain age, we’re not able to build up any more bone density and having weak bones can make you more prone to osteoporosis. This means you won’t be as strong and as healthy when you get older.
Throughout college until now, I was relying on my metabolism to take care of it for me. And what I realized is even though I’m healthy now, not paying attention to my health will take a toll on me in the long term. I realized that when I go to grad school, I really need to take better care of myself.
Go to the university gym (or find an activity that gets you moving that you enjoy).
We are paying through fees to the university for the gym. I did the math, and at my university, I think it comes out to be about $40 a month or something like that. And it’s not something you can opt out of. Maximize your gym membership at your university because gym memberships after college are really expensive, especially the ones that have the same level of amenities as the ones in university have.
Even if you don’t go to the gym, finding an activity that gets you moving, that you enjoy is the more important part. If you live in an area where the weather is relatively nice or can be nice depending on the season, I would recommend doing things outside, take advantage of the sunny weather, the breeze, feel the fresh air on your skin, touch grass, do something that gets you moving. And once you get moving, you will feel a lot brighter and happier, I’ve noticed.
Learn what you like to cook and eat and find methods and schedules that make it easy to cook.
I learned that I needed to learn how to cook if I wanted to eat the foods I wanted to eat. One thing that really helps me is to have a couple of easy go to recipes that I can always eat no matter what and that are relatively easy to make. For example, curry, chicken soup with rice. These are very flavorful and comforting to me, and it requires little to no effort in terms of thinking in order to throw it together because you’re throwing it all in a pot.
The other thing I realized for me personally is that I actually don’t like touching raw meat, and so that kind of prevented me from cooking for a while. And once I realized that, I now use gloves whenever I have to touch raw meat.
Sometimes I will batch cook meals, like a big batch of curry or something, and that’s dinner or lunch for the week. So I end up cooking twice a week so then I don’t have to cook every day. But I also cannot cook one thing and eat it for the whole week. I need some variety. Knowing that about yourself is really important when it comes to meal planning and grocery shopping.
Get enough sleep and understand your energy patterns.
In college, I would stay up a lot to study. But, honestly, after a certain point, my brain doesn’t operate anymore. And so I really should have gone to sleep a lot of those times. And upon coming to graduate school, I realized that I am a sleepy girl. With sleep, one of the important things to realize about yourself is your chronotype, which could be rooted in a little bit of pseudoscience. But regardless, the idea is, to know what your energy levels are.
I’ve noticed that my energy is the highest in the middle of the day, and then by the end of the day, it’s starting to dip a little bit. And so because I know that about myself, I try to plan to do more “heavy lifting” lifting work earlier in the day rather than later in the day. And then in the evening, I go to sleep, when I’m tired and try not to stay up too late.
Getting sleep is very important because when you’re sleeping you’re basically recharging your brain, your body. If you don’t get your sleep, you will feel it. You will feel the brain fog. Even though in the short term, it might be easy to make convenient decisions or to stay up late to work on some things, try to not make it a habit, because it will catch up with you.
There have been times in my graduate school experience where I started noticing my eye was twitching or my eyes literally could not stay open. And I had to go to sleep, and then I would sleep for ten hours or more. And my body would be so physically exhausted. And so those are things that can happen to you as well if you do not pay attention to how you are taking care of your body on a day to day basis.
Final Thoughts
I hope that it at least encourages you to start thinking about how you can take better care of yourself so that you can come out of graduate school, not too I guess, maybe not healthier than you were, but not worse off.
Think about how you can move a little bit more in your life, eat better, eat healthier, make better decisions regarding your physical health so that when you finish graduate school, you can have these habits and build upon them rather than letting the grad school process tear you down mentally, physically, emotionally.
The key is to be able to identify when you’re starting to feel a bit off and then figure out what you can do slowly to build back up the habit. So don’t feel bad if you’re not able to do this consistently. The point is to do it, so that you can feel better on the day to day.
Brittany Trinh 