Gone Bananas

Last week I went grocery shopping, as usual, and purchased bananas, which is also usual. I buy bananas almost every time I go to the grocery store, not because I like them, but because I feel like I should eat them because they're healthy. More often than not I end up giving them away to my roommates to eat, or making them into banana bread or chocolate chip oatmeal banana cookies, which doesn't really make them very healthy to eat, sadly.

So last week I bought 3 bananas and promised myself I would eat them. No excuses. They sat on my counter for the next four days and I would look at them in the morning and come up with some reason to not eat one that day... for four days in a row. Unfortunately there aren't many good reason to not eat bananas, because, unlike yogurt, they are extremely portable- you don't need any sort of utensil or even any preparation time to eat them. They're just made ready-to-go. That's the unfortunate part.

On Monday I realized I needed to get going if I was going to fulfill my promise to myself. So, over the course of the next three days I ate one banana per day. Three bananas, three days. I've been spending a considerable amount of time in the Tanner Building studying, often for 5-8 hour periods of time, so I would start eating the banana in the morning, and work on it throughout the day. On Monday I still had more than half of it left by the time I needed to walk home. I passed so many garbage cans and almost threw the rest of it away so many times! But I didn't. I kept plugging along. One bit at a time. Continuous improvement was my motto, however, like Toyota. Listen to this: it only took me 5 hours to eat the banana yesterday! (It was a little more urgent yesterday than the other days though, because by that point it was over a week old and turned browner and browner with every minute I didn't eat it.

All this banana-eating has caused me to wonder how valuable bananas really are to one's health, so I did a little research. It turns out that bananas are associated with a reduced risk of breast cancern and the juice treats high blood pressure and kidney stones. Wikipedia says, they, "also contain considerable amounts of vitamin B, and vitamin C, and potassium. The latter makes them of particular interest to athletes who use them to quickly replenish their electrolytes." So... considering I'm a newly renewed athlete (among other reasons), it's apparently a very good thing that I've increased my banana consumption as of late.