The Bet

What is harder exercising on a Friday afternoon when you could be napping?  Exercising on a Friday afternoon when your roommate is literally waving a slice of pizza under your nose.  They warn you about the Freshmen Fifteen, but what about the Townhouse Ten?  When you can suddenly bake pistachio and chocolate chip cookies to your heart’s content and frozen pizza is accessible at any hour of the night?  After a freshman year of up and down health habits (up—Billy Blanks Taebo videos with my roommate, down—Taco Bell at 2:00 am), I took up running and P90X sophomore year and started visiting the salad bar a little more.  There is a perfect park for running about a mile away from Rockhurst’s campus, Loose Park, and I love going there when the weather is nice, or just running on the Rockhurst field, which is handily lit up all night for night owls like myself.  But this year life in a townhouse full of baked goods and snacks has made staying healthy a bit more of a challenge.

            Enter the bet.  The other girl in the picture is my roommate Samantha—looks nice as can be but her hobbies include eating chips while laughing at my yoga skills and beating me in bets.  After she got a few days worth of enjoyment out of torturing me while I exercised, she and I decided that we really did need to change our bad eating habits and perhaps a friendly bet was just the thing to motivate us.  This particular bet involves no fast food and no eating after 10:00 pm (we are notorious for breaking out the pita chips and cream cheese while watching Grey’s Anatomy at 11:00 pm).  I have to give credit where credit is due—we borrowed this idea from three sophomore friends of ours who made a bet that the first person to eat sweets would have to dye their hair black for a week.  Samantha and I are trying to come up with some sort of similar consequence for the loser of our bet.  Suggestions so far include hair dying, chores, or having to get another piercing (and if you look at my first post, you can see that I’m not too keen on needles).  None of these have really jumped out at us yet, though, so we are open to suggestions (feel free to post some!).  I think this bet will be good for us in the long run, and I am excited to eat healthier to go with my running habit.  That being said, it’s 12:30 am on day one, and I’m starving. 

P.S. Stay tuned for another post later this week…I am going to dinner tomorrow with our visiting scholar Reza Aslan and I’ll update you all on that!