During comprehensive exams, the speaker survived on jelly beans, Cheez-Its, and vanilla cream cookies, justifying them as protein sources. The sugar crash tanked their sleep and focus. Switching to vegetables transformed their productivity and made studying actually work.
Food is important. It's a fuel, and you want to put good fuel into your body. I will tell you, when I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I lived on some incredibly basic food groups that really fueled me: jelly beans, Cheez-Its, and cheap vanilla cream cookies. And I had all kinds of justification. Cheez-Its—well, that had to be protein because there was cheese. And jelly beans—well, beans everybody knows are good for us. And vanilla cream—well, vanilla—that's an expensive spice. That's got to be good for me. And I came in one day to do studying and I had a 1-pound box of Cheez-Its and I put it down in the chair next to me and I looked and found out there were 4 empty 1-pound boxes of Cheez-Its there. And at that moment, I realized I'm probably going to need a vegetable because I wasn't sleeping that well and I was pushing, using bad food to move me forward and sugars to keep me up. I switched my diet pretty quickly. All of a sudden, I was a lot more efficient.
