Students are busy people. There’s a lot going on between classes, homework, clubs, work, internships, having a social life, etc. Sometimes you can’t fit in long workouts, 8 hours of sleep, and healthy home cooked meals. That means it’s time to be a kinda-sorta healthy person (KSHP)! 

Below, I’ll show you a sample week in the life of a KSHP. The KSHP works under 2 principles: 1) The small things count, 2) Doing something is better than nothing. Below, I’ll show examples of a few healthy things the KSHP could do every day. (Note: These are the healthy choices; the unhealthy choices of the week aren’t shown.)

Let’s see some examples of how this works. 

Table of Contents

My Favorite 20 Minute Work-Out – Meg Turney

8:00 AM: KSHP has a late afternoon class and decides to do a workout in the morning before showering. No chair, no medicine ball, no weights? No problem. Meg Turney’s 20-minute workout (above) only needs a timer that goes off every minute and that’s it. 4-5 reps for 3 moves: reverse lunges, push ups, and bicycle crunches. Do 20 sets in 20 minutes. 

5:00 PM: KSHP has a 3-hour class until 9 PM and swings by the salad bar and fills a portable bowl with hard boiled eggs, mandarin oranges, cucumber, and grapes to munch on during a class break. No salad dressing, just salt and pepper for the eggs.

Tuesday

9:00 AM: KSHP is sore from the 20-minute workout and decides that walking will be the exercise for today. Taking a more inefficient route to and back from class today clocks 7,000 steps. 

1:00 PM: A trip to student services, a professor’s office hours, and to a club gets KSHP to 10,000 steps.

11:00 PM: Nighttime craving for soda strikes. Wanting something sweet to drink but not super unhealthy, KSHP mixes in a teaspoon of honey with water and warms up the glass for 20 seconds in the microwave.