my life, my pace

I'm bad.  I don't eat breakfast.  Ever.  Well, except when someone forces me to, which only rarely happens and is usually accompanied by regret.  I know that breakfast is supposedly "the most important meal of the day," but I just don't like eating in the morning.  Doing so just makes me feel all blah and unproductive.  I also don't like to eat before exams.  So if I have a final at 8am, I don't go out of my way to eat beforehand.  Nope.  I just wake up, take the final, then eat afterwards.  Worked pretty well in undergrad because most of my finals were at 8am.  But in med school, things were different.  Some of my finals were in the afternoon.  Which meant that I had to eat some time before the final since I couldn't possibly starve myself until 4pm (which is when 1pm finals usually end).  And I always hated those afternoon exams without really knowing why.  Now because of this study that suggests that being hungry actually affects the hippocampus (the area of the brain associated with memory and learning among other things) in mice, I wonder if I didn't like those afternoon exams because I couldn't go into them slightly hungry.  This study (if it's true in humans) explains why I don't like eating in the morning or before exams: because not eating keeps me sharper.  Wow.  I never knew that not eating before exams was my secret.  Shh.  Don't go telling everyone now.

Related posts:

1. now eat your veggies, even if i don’t eat mineIf only that were a feasible thing to do. Apparently it’s not. A recent study showed that a taste for meat and fish is inherited while that for vegetables and desserts is not, suggesting that children’s dislike of vegetables may be more the result of their parents dislike for them than that of genetics. Now that sure seems like a convenient explanation—let’s blame parents for their kids’ low-veggies-high-sweets diets. I happen to be one of those people who absolutely hate vegetables. My parents didn’t really like vegetables either, but they forced themselves to eat them anyway. And I even ate some vegetables when I was younger. But for most of my adult life, I did not eat vegetables (I say this in the past tense because I’m now working very hard to incorporate veggies into my super carnivore diet). I quickly perfected my picking-every-single-tiny-bit-of-vegetable-out-of-everything-I-eat skills (I called it surgical training). What’s more, there were certain vegetables that would “contaminate” my food so much so that picking them out did not make that dish edible for me. My number one enemy: cilantro. Once there is even so much as a microscopic amount of cilantro in my food, I cannot eat it, no matter what because the food tastes like cilantro even if the cilantro is removed. It really does and I can’t stand it. It’s the same with other vegetables that have been mixed in with my meat. I’ll pick them out, but the meat tastes like the vegetable even though...
2. my new and improved lab routine…...if I can stick to it (which I failed miserably at today, by the way). 9:00 am - Arrive (I My husband just can't seem to wake up any earlier). 9-9:30 am - Get my daily surfing routine out of the way in record time. 9:30-11 am - Study, study, study! 11 am - Start getting hungry...no, you can't eat until you finish this section! Force myself to keep studying. 12 pm - Whoo-hoo! Food! You know, your brain needs food to learn... 12:20-12:40 pm - Supplemental internet surfing ("study break") 12:40-4 pm - Study, study, study! 4 pm - Start anticipating time to go home. More supplemental surfing. 4:10 pm - Must...make...use...of...time. Back to studying, though at slower pace. 5:20 pm - Husband finally picks me up from this hell. Compare that to my old lab routine and you should be very proud of me. Now if only I can keep it up for the next 2.5 months....
3. seriously now, time to get down to businessThe business of studying, that is. The thing is, I've forgotten how to do it. No, wait. I never knew how to in the first place. I have fond memories of my high school days when I set my alarm clock for 6am so that I could study for the calculus test only to wake up at 4am to turn it off. And yet I maintained a 4.0 unweighted GPA and was class valedictorian. Then there was college. I tried to study, really I did. But I never could. Every midterm and every final was studied for at most two days beforehand (even biochem with all of its crazy pathways). I still remember that one time I stayed up until 4am studying (caffeine-free no less) for an 8am biochem final because I had underestimated how long it was going to take me to go over everything. I woke up at 6:58am and shut off the alarm that was set for 7am, thinking I was going to get out of bed in a minute. The next time I woke up, it was 8:15am. Flustered as I was and with the minimal amount of studying I did, I still finished the test early and got my A. Then there was med school. Which kicked my ass. However, I define getting my ass kicked as not getting an A. Um, yeah. Studying two days before the test was just not going to work. So after that first "painful" (OMG, I got a B,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.