I went to a boarding school in Denmark (efterskole) for two years in the mid 00s, whose entire thing was âhealthy eating and exercise leads to a healthy mind leads to the ability to learn and become an enlightened and informed participant of societyâ. the one thing they kept repeating over and over is âdonât drink your calories it will make you anxious and hungry and if itâs in the form of Coca Cola the caffeine will only exacerbate thisâ
We would regularly have guest speakers on a variety of topics - an anorexia patient, a person whoâd studied abroad in the USA, a person who freestyled their further education (this was about to be abolished so not an option for us, but still an inspiring talk), a person whoâd refused their military service and was instead doing community service (and why), and so on and so forth.
At one point we had a guest speaker come talk about it his work with juvenile delinquents.
He was the overseer of a house where these kids (our age! Some younger!) lived - not a prison - and where they would receive schooling to complete their mandatory primary education in a setting where social workers were on hand to assist and basically the whole point was to nurture the kids in an attempt to prevent them from choosing a life of crime and/or become dependent on the welfare system due to inability to work. They had support, teachers, people who believed in them, etc.
And yet these kids were failing. They were unruly, anxious, restless, spent their breaks smoking or going to the corner shop for soft drinks or snacks and were too wired to settle down at night to sleep so would often wind up sneaking out and causing trouble - even if the trouble was only some half asses graffiti on a bus stop .and in the morning they would be too exhausted to get up and would take half a day - until lunch, when they would be going on their corner shop lunch break - to wake up.
The problem was: these kids werenât eating proper food. They were subsisting on nicotine, sugary snacks, and Coca Cola. So this guy, whoâd heard of our school, got in touch and requested meal plans and then introduced mandatory breakfast and lunch, with dinner still optional, all following our schoolâs carefully designed meal plans (vegetable frontloaded with only 100g meat per person, one vegetarian day, one fish day, all bread made with whole meal flour. And since this was Denmark, dinner was a âcold tableâ i.e. rye bread with various topping choices, salads, and any lunch leftovers reheated as a side). And he made it mandatory for all the staff too, and assigned seating groups with a staff member (we had this at our school too), so that each meal resembled a family meal.
And suddenly these kids were having complete breakfasts with oatmeal porridge and yogurt and toast and some fruit and milk and orange juice, which gave them a solid source of energy to start the day, and they had a hot meal for lunch, and after a about a week of this dinner attendance skyrocketed. The kids werenât restless and anxious anymore. Most of them voluntarily quit smoking and most of them stopped getting a soft drink from the corner shop too - they werenât hungry anymore, so the sugary craving went away. These kids, just because they were getting three solid meals every day, flourished. They could concentrate in class. They were awake in the morning. They didnât stay up late wired and restless. They all graduated and went back home and didnât see the inside of any system, welfare or criminal, again. These kids didnât want to be troublemakers - they just (for whatever reason) didnât have the foundation they needed to succeed and that foundation, it turned out, was proper nutrition.
Really, truly, please do not underestimate eating. Donât skip your meals. Take care of yourself.
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