Its unhealthy, so of course I like it!

I don’t know when it started, but for as long as I can remember my love of fast food has been one of my vices. The food is just so fast, so yummy, and so accessible! Especially now that I am on my own, without my parents to provide me with home cooked meals, I find that I am eating fast food more and more each year. A lot of times I attribute this need for fast food with being a busy college student, as well as not knowing how to make more than a couple meals on my own. So fast food becomes my alternative.

But it’s more than that! Unless you are a super healthy person or have a lot of self- control there’s another factor that comes into play: fast food is delicious! I crave it! There are so many fast food joints to choose from to meet your taste bud needs! I know it’s unhealthy and I’ll regret it in my later years, but I find myself thinking, “Hey, I’m young! I want to enjoy life. I’m going to eat the food I want, when I want until I cant anymore. What’s wrong with that?” The problem is its horrible for my body and the food cost adds up after so long. Not to mention, if I ever have kids I could easily pass on my bad eating habits on to them.

When you think about it, fast food seems to be a vice for our country, as a whole, since the United States is one of the most obese nations in the world. In most cities you cant go more than a few miles without seeing some form of a fast food restaurant. The number of McDonalds in an area is actually pretty ridiculous!

Even with all the information we have about the reality of fast food we are constantly sent mixed messages by the media. It seems like every other television commercial or add in a magazine is some kind of fast food advertisement and then the other half are messages about body image and society’s idea of beauty.

To be honest, I don’t know how so many people manage to resist the temptation that is fast food with how much it is a part of American society, even though we are all well aware of how detrimental it can be to our health. All I know is I personally struggle to limit the amount of fast food I am eating every week and if I could I would gladly make fast food less of a vice for me.

OMG SHOES!!!...Wait, what?

Over this semester, I have had a few friends trying to convince me that my shoes are bad for my feet. It’s not like I was wearing a raggedy pair of Chucks, Vans, or flip-flops when they were telling me this; I was wearing my nice and comfortable Asics. Sure, they might be a little worn, but they were designed for running. Of course, this would lead me to assume that they are good for my feet. It makes perfect sense, right?

I thought you would agree.

Well, it turns out when they were talking about my shoes, they were actually referring to ALL shoes. I was force-fed the concept of “barefoot running,” which I immediately thought of as a new hipster fad. With all of the heath benefits that were being preached to me (e.g. less headaches, backaches, etc.), I couldn’t help but dive deeper and research this new phenomenon. In the process, my worldviews were tampered with: shoes can be a vice! Someone should let Kelly know about this revelation right away!

Once I learned about what “barefoot running” was, it was suddenly the only thing I saw or heard about anymore. There’s a news report from today that showcases a barefoot runner talking about all of the good things that running barefoot does for him, along with a counter claim against barefoot running from a podiatrist. These two viewpoints epitomize the biggest question with barefoot running: is it good or bad for you?

Research studies that I have found suggest that the impact that your feet absorb when you run are lessened with a good technique through bare feet as opposed to shod feet. Also, the likelihood of injury drops when one runs barefoot (nerds should click here and here). Of course, these are only but a couple studies conducted on the mechanics of barefoot running. In several articles about this subject, it is emphasized that there are individual differences between feet. This means that barefoot running may not be physically healthy for everybody. As some people need glasses to see, some people need shoes to walk.

Biologically speaking, walking barefoot is a natural thing for human beings to do. With this in mind, one may get the impression that shoes are unnecessary. While being barefoot is natural, concrete roads and sidewalks are not. Bare feet could take a beating on these very hard surfaces. Shoes are designed to correct this, but nothing is designed perfectly. There is a strict policy in gyms that require everybody to wear shoes when exercising. There is also the strong possibility of getting frostbite during the wintertime. Although bare feet seem like a good idea, there are many obstacles that we face on a daily basis that make it easier to just wear shoes.

However...

If you still want to try it out, start off with a lap or two in your backyard or jog a short distance at the park. The key is building up to running a mile, or two, or ten. Through this practice, you naturally learn how to run correctly while building up muscles that were previously deactivated in shoes. If you try to run a 5K while barefoot for the first time, you may decide that it would be your last as you gingerly walk back home on bloody, blistered, and bruised feet.

By the way, if going barefoot seems appealing, but you don’t want to walk or run around in your naked and vulnerable feet, you may want to look into Vibram FiveFingers shoes. It is the closest you can get to being barefoot while still in footwear. If you are worried that these are useless novelty items, there have been research studies conducted on these shoes.

In case anybody was wondering whether I am going to take my friends’ advice and free myself from the evils of shoe-dom, my answer is that I probably am. I love to run recreationally and for my health, and I already am barefoot 6 hours a week during my Judo class, granted that I’m on a mat. It seems really interesting, and I want to try it before I make any further judgments.