Wellness on the Go

Every morning, set up in front of the senior bar, is a crowd of people busily handing out white paper bags full of breakfast to sleepy and late Stuyvesant students. Called Breakfast on the Go, it is an initiative led by the Wellness Council.

The Wellness Council was created by seniors Vanna Mavromatis, Hasan Tukhtamishev, and Nicole Cheng, during their sophomore year, from the suggestion and with the encouragement of physical education teacher Dr. Anna Markova.

They wanted to educate their peers about health awareness and offer services, like that of Breakfast on the Go, to encourage students to care more about their lifestyle choices. “We tend to ignore our health and prioritize basically everything else above it,” Mavromatis said. “We wanted to try and help Stuy students make little, healthy changes here and there that would hopefully add up, at least a little, in the long run to combat specific health issues.”

Sleep deprivation was one of the first problems they wanted to address. However, early on, the leaders recognized that fixing the all-nighter culture at Stuyvesant was going to be difficult. “We knew we couldn’t make a dent in that regard, because we can’t monitor the students at home or force sleep on them,” Mavromatis said.

The next logical step was relieving the general stress levels. “Stress,” Mavromatis explained, “can lead to a myriad of health issues, especially in the long run.” Although she believes that the administration is at least partly a contributor to these high stress levels, it’s also a natural byproduct of the environment.

“If you put a bunch of high achieving kids in a competitive, work intense environment, of course it’s going to end in students neglecting their health,” she said. Their goal was to make some healthier options more convenient. She believes that the administration has been helpful in executing this goal, because they also want the same for the students.

“Although we didn’t have very many specific details in mind at the very beginning, just a general idea and hope, our plan from there was basically promoting fun, healthy events,” Mavromatis said.

The one event they wanted to do from the beginning was Duct Tape a Teacher, which they held in the annual health fair last year. Partnered with the Stuyvesant Red Cross, the health fair is an annual school-wide event where booths are set up to promote healthy diets and healthy exercise routines.

Last year, they also collaborated with the Stuyvesant Environmental Club to hand out blue wellness bottles to all students during homeroom.

“What we then noticed is that a lot of students tend to neglect their nutritional needs, such as skipping lunch to study or not eating breakfast because of a lack of time,” Mavromatis said. “This was also something we wanted to impact.”

Thus, they began Breakfast on the Go, a new initiative started this January and designed for students who came in at 7:50 or later to grab breakfast and still make it to class on time. Every morning, the cafeteria provides them with fifty breakfasts.

The Wellness Council also works with the cafeteria staff to set up. If people want breakfast, all they have to do is give them the ID, so they can record that they actually got breakfast. “We start handing out breakfast at 7:50, just because it’s only for people who are late to school,” sophomore and President Jerry Ye explained.“Other students can just head up to the cafeteria, so we wouldn’t want to waste some of the food downstairs.” They end around 8:05 and then clean up.

“Pretty much every day we’ve been doing this, which we’ve been doing for the past two months or so,” Ye continued.“We give out every single breakfast provided to us.”

Ye’s participation in the Wellness Council is largely accredited to his interest in health and well-being in general. “In seventh grade, I tried really hard to get really healthy and fit,” Ye said. “I guess that’s when I started searching up a lot of [health] articles online.”

Exploring different health initiatives has been a topic that interested Ye for a while.

“Based on what I’ve research so far, I think health culture is biased,” Ye said. Compared to the volatile worlds of politics and economics, the actual idea of good health does not shift easily. However, because it is often set aside as a minor priority, more powerful political ideals often taint its interpretation.

An example he provided was Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign she avidly promoted in 2010. “Originally, it was a campaign against sugar,” Ye explained. “After she started being sponsored by some obviously biased corporations, like Wal-Mart, the campaign changed simply into a campaign for exercise. This is an example of how the corruption in the real world can shift the society’s views for health.”

Ye believes that this corruption cannot be easily pushed aside. When asked how he sees the purpose of the Wellness Council, Ye simply said, “We stand for wellness initiatives.”

Wellness, a term repeatedly emphasized in junior health classes, has a meaning that extends far beyond the dictionary definition of simply “being in a state of good health.”

“Wellness is taking care of your body, so that it can function as well as possible,” Mavromatis explained. “It’s just making sure that when you push yourself, you won’t collapse altogether.”

It’s important to mention that this does not mean there is a standard health protocol. Ye said, “It’s all about having your body feel better in the long run by properly taking care of it.” Wellness is more personal in that it emphasizes striving towards the highest potential of health that an individual can realistically achieve.

For instance, having a chronic disease does not automatically make you “unwell.” Different definitions of health may not be applicable to specific individuals, who are only concerned with their own measures of well-being.

But even so, to achieve this, everyone has to recognize the importance of health and understand how to improve it. This is the Wellness Council’s place in the student body.

Starting the next school year, Ye has big dreams for the club. “Recently, I’ve been trying to change the Wellness Council,” Ye explained. “I’ve tried to get more members engaged.”

The Wellness Council is currently a small club, and Mavromatis believes it’s because there was a lack of initiative from the very beginning. “It was often difficult to think of events that students would care about and even more difficult to pull them off,” she said. “But I’m confident that going forward, the club will grow, especially with Jerry at the helm, and now that we’ve built some degree of experience and I guess trustworthiness.”

She’s right. Ye already has plans. He wants to first separate the club into multiple departments that more people can register for.

Another idea he has is to start publishing a school-wide health newsletter. Led by the writing department, the newsletter will feature articles that promote well-being and tips for being healthy. “Examples of articles would be nutritious tips. Like, in our society, a large proportion of what we ingest is sugar. It’s way higher than it should be,” Ye said. “Or the idea that fat has been villainized, even though it is not as big of a villain as it may seem. It’s just that corporate markets make them out to be the villain.”

To have it reach a larger general Stuyvesant community, Ye is considering to either partner up with a school publication or create their own.“My vision for it is to be able to constantly pump out newsletters featuring 3-5 articles each issue,” Ye said.

With the seniors’ support, Ye is confident that they can turn the Wellness Council’s inactivity around. “We have even more plans for the rest of the school year,” Ye said. “And I’m really looking forward to implementing them.”