There was one point in my life where my diet was influenced by a social norm. Many of my peers tend to eat a lot of fast food on campus and from OrderUp.com. I usually opted to not eat these type of meals because I was used to being in shape and healthy. I ended up hurting my back during the middle of junior year and that drastically changed my eating habits. I went from having a very healthy and active lifestyle to a sedentary one. From this, I grew lazy and began to eat less and less of homecooked meals that I would prep. I began to order a lot of food such as pizza and wings from different shops around State College since it was cheap and easy. This eventually led to me doing this more and more as I fell into a habit of constantly ordering food whenever I would get back from class or from being to lazy to make some of my own food. As can be foretold, I began to pack on the pounds and eventually put on 20 pounds over this time period. This is one instance in my life where I went from my own eating habits to a norm of eating fast food that was cheap and easy to acquire during my time as a Junior at Penn State.
My food choice in the above paragraph was decided from my obesity at the time. The root cause of this was my sedentary lifestyle at play. But in addition to this, I was eating a lot of wings, pizza, and other junk food that was contributing to my weight gain. The norm while at college is to eat almost anything that is placed before you. There are many times at meetings where free pizza is an incentive to go to these meetings. In addition to this, OrderUp plays a huge role in delivering food from pizza and wings shop all across campus. I began to order many meals from the website because it was quicker and easier than going to the store, buying healthier foods, and making it on my own. To combat this, I think that the new social norm that should be in place is advertising healthier alternatives to pizza and wings as well as going out and buying your own food. I believe that if healthier alternatives were to be obtained as easy and as cheap as pizza and wings, obesity could be curbed rather easily.
Hi Justin names Gershom and my post can be found here http://geog030.dutton.psu.edu/2016/03/15/module-6-gershom-espinoza/. Similar to your post I wrote on how the social norms at school can affect one’s dietary lifestyle. I too used to have a convenient based mindset when it came to food (didn’t help that growing up most of my food was home-cooked by my mom as we had a big family=not learning nor appreciating what it took to cook for myself). Due to a development of prehypertension in early highschool I too altered my diet although I actually did so this year (2016 resolutions can be real 😉 The challenge for me now was to pick healthy nutritious food that could be duplicated at home and though I don’t live off campus yet I know for a fact that I will keep making “good” food because my diet change was caused by health concern rather than a trend. I encourage you to take advantage of food especially in season.