The Late Teens Diet

      Like any age bracket past infancy, there can be no sole dietary pattern to associate with people in their late teens.  We are coming of age in an interesting time in history.  A time where it’s popular to go green or eat organic but it is not convenient or economical.  We love our parent’s cooking, we love our fast food, we hate our cafeteria food.  There are some exceptions to this basic rule, but is does resonate with most of our population.  We have no set schedule throughout the year or we have so many conflicting schedules (school, work, parties, etc) which makes it a novelty to eat appropriate food at the appropriate time.  Some of us eat three square meals a day with a glass of milk at each one and some of us are lucky if we squeeze in a cup of noodles between class and a nap.

My own diet is erratic.  On average i consume three diet sodas a day.  On a good day I consume more.  My limited cooking skills ensure that most of my meals are instant or microwavable.  There are days when I don’t eat between eight AM and eight PM.  There are days when I eat every eight minutes.  I like salad very much but eating fruits and vegetables as snacks doesn’t tickle my fancy.  If I am desperate enough I will east something off the floor or out of the trash, but I believe it is making my immune system stronger by teaching it how to man up.  All in all I wouldn’t call my diet healthy, but I am in no way on my way to an untimely death because of it.  We’ll leave that to the rest of my habits.

Despite my questionable eating habits, when I got to college and started eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with several other seventeen and eighteen year olds I observed things that I thought were strange.  Out of the four girls I eat dinner with, three of them drink soda.  The one who does drink soda drinks as much as I do but hers isn’t diet.  One of the girls is a vegan and incorporates salad or cereal into every meal, which makes the glutton inside me cry tears of longing for her.  Two of them are extremely picky and will complain about the food we are served and sometimes refuse to eat it.  Not only does this baffle me (it’s free and it’s hot) but I feel like making a scene because the potatoes are too lumpy is childish and unnecessary.  One out of the five of us can be labeled as a healthy eater (the vegan), one is healthy until she gets the munchies, and the other two don’t discriminate when it comes to carbs or calories (although they are the picky ones).

So when the easy mac has been devoured or the celery finally gets out from in between ones teeth, there is no safe bet what an adolescent will put on his or her meal plan at the end of high school.  It is a time of transition, a time of change.  These changes and transitions may make us too nervous to eat more than a few bites of pork chop but they could also make us eat our nerves and then some.  We don’t eat out all the time and hardly cook full-fledged courses for ourselves, leaving a lot of variety for snacks, half-assed dinners, and free-for-all dinners with our parents.  Our diets, like our sleep schedules and means of entertainment are something that will hopefully be fine tuned and advanced as we eat our way into adulthood.