For the first time in a long time, I was actually able to sit down and watch a movie this weekend. I have grown so accustomed to being busy and packing my schedule on a daily basis almost for the sake of being busy, I didn’t totally know what to do with the free time I found on Sunday night. So I sat down and pressed play on – surprise – a food documentary.

I’d heard rumblings about “Fed Up” not only in the foodie community, but from journalists as well. Katie Couric narrating a feature-length film about the food industry? Sounds promising. So I gave it a shot and had my world rocked.

The great “Balancing Act” of eating healthy comes down to this: eating healthy food and being able to afford healthy food. As a broke college student, this is something that plagues me regularly. Why would I buy the no-sugar added pasta sauce for significantly more money than the kind with sugar? They both taste just as good, and one is easier on my wallet.

But before you write off added sugar as “just one of those things,” consider this statistic from “Fed Up:” By 2050, one in three Americans will have diabetes.

I know that as young adults with high metabolisms, the effects of a poor diet may not show in the form of fat or acne. But this body you live in is the one body you get for the rest of your life, and the choices you make now will stick with this one body for the rest of your life.

I write a lot about cooking, the techniques I try and the weird foods I eat (alligator, most recently), but at the root of cooking is nutrition. Cooking gives you the opportunity to eat foods the way they were meant to be eaten, without machinery or chemicals involved. And that food we put into our bodies is a fuel that will keep our bodies running for as long as possible.

You wouldn’t put diesel fuel into a car that runs on ethanol. So why would you put processed sugar and chemicals into your body, which runs best on unprocessed, chemical-free and no-sugar-added food. Just some food for thought.

— Kristina Bornholtz, managing editor

It is so hard to be inside when the sun’s rays creep through the windows during class. I can hear the birds chirping their little song, enjoying the warmth while I’m stuck indoors writing papers and working on the computer. This put me in an absolutely foul mood this week.

I don’t know if you’re as grouchy as the end of the semester nears, with its outstanding amount of projects and papers, but I’m guessing none of us are in the

best of moods thanks to all the stress.

I took a step back from my year-end anxiety and, you guessed it, made a list. Instead of listing out everything I have to do and the timeframe in which I have to finish it all, I listed things I’m thankful to have. Is it cheesy? A little. Did it improve my mood? Yes.

First off, I recognized how lucky I am to be enrolled here at UW-Eau Claire. As college students, we are some of the most fortunate people in the world. We are clothed, have places to live, food to eat and money to spend on higher education.

Not everything was quite that deep, I promise. Morning coffee, my favorite pair of shoes and an unexpected hug from a friend also made that list.

This may sound like a useless activity, but hey, don’t knock it before you try it. I encourage you to write it out in a journal or a place you can leave room to add to the list later.

— Anna Mateffy, photo & multimedia editor

As I sat in The Spectator office this week, I overheard my coworkers hashing out the details for feature on dual sport athletes. The idea of being on two sports teams left me reflecting on my own athletic past. Well, perhaps my not so athletic past.

At my parents house there are buttons with my photo on them to prove I’ve tried just about every sport. Including the year of green soccer jerseys when I wore obnoxious pigtails on picture day. Nothing ever quite stuck.

I had a brief stint as a hockey player, a fact most people who have met me in college find unfathomable. I balled it up in, in house basketball in third grade. My

team, the boilermakers, won the championship. However, I cried about having to miss an out of town family gathering for my lame basketball tournament and my mom let me skip the game. It didn’t faze me that I missed the “big game.”

It’s not that I’m not competitive. I think my coworkers would all tell you otherwise, especially when it comes to Spectator chair races. It’s just the sport I like and the only sport I’ve ever been relatively good at didn’t come in to play until later in life.

My high school cross country and track teammates remain some of my closest friends today. Running for the UW-Eau Claire cross-country team was a definite highlight of my first two years of college. However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t breath a sigh of relief when the season wrapped up and I could slip back into a “normal” college kid schedule. Being a student athlete is grueling. The time you put in is enormous and the practices are long and challenging.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m amazed at the small number of Blugolds who can do that for more than one team. Their commitment is admirable. It makes my morning or afternoon jogs seem miniscule.

— Courtney Kueppers, Editor in Chief