“No One Eats Alone” day was celebrated on February 14th! It is a great opportunity to consider our surroundings, to look at the people around that interact with us, that talk with us or even if they only pass by everyday. This day raises awareness of the social aspects in human’s nature and the emotional impact that eating alone or with someone could have on us.
Eating alone seems harmless, some of us may consider that it is better to eat alone because it is more calm and you could feel more comfortable, either in school or in other places like restaurants or home people eat alone often for the same reasons. But eating alone is actually unhealthy, many studies in nutrition and physiology revealed that it could increase the risk of suffering depression or cognitive decline as it also could also affect the way or what we eat, repeating the same meal, lower intake of vegetables and fruits, not eating sometimes or having a unorganized meal schedule which could lead to problems with our weight, etc.
Now the day of No one eats alone doesn’t seem so exaggerated or unimportant as many of us may think, being alone will affect you, even if you say you like it, humans are sociable by nature and that is a fact that cannot be avoided.
Many of us have friends to talk or eat in lunch, but there is always people that maybe doesn’t share an schedule with their friends or maybe they are new and didn’t have time to make friends, maybe they are not extroverts or find it difficult to talk with someone, maybe they speak another language and feel insecure when they have to speak English to participate or simply to socialize with their classmates, there are a lot of reasons why students ended up eating alone or being silent in their classes.
The feelings of being ashamed, being shy and being indifferent to our surroundings are walls that we make to ourselves, and that we need to take them down and replace them with confidence and self-esteem. This seems difficult at first, but we have to try, we need to take steps to achieve it, take your time but keep going. The challenge could have started, or perhaps you missed out on February 14th, it doesn’t matter when, just try.