The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed

How to Manage Food, Booze, Stress, Sex, Sleep, and Exercise on Campus

Non-Fiction - Health - Fitness
264 Pages
Reviewed on 06/07/2021
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Author Biography

Jill and Dave Henry met coaching high school sports in Los Angeles and have been working with teens for nearly fifteen years. With every graduating class, they’ve fielded their student-athletes’ concerns about the transition to college. Determined to help, the Henrys decided to leverage their combined professional skills in research, study design, data analysis, and storytelling (Jill is a veteran statistics teacher, Dave is a Peabody-award winning TV and film editor) to create a fun yet informative resource with the goal of preparing all students to enjoy college without sacrificing their health.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Marie-Hélène Fasquel for Readers' Favorite

The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed: How to Manage Food, Booze, Stress, Sex, Sleep, and Exercise on Campus by Jill and Dave Henry instantly caught my attention as a mother and teacher. This guide kept its promises: it is comprehensive and engaging. Students need all the support they can get, particularly in these times of crisis when it is hard for them to study in a relaxed way and take care of themselves. This knowledgeable, fun companion explores a wide range of topics, including food, exercise, stress, sleep, and even “booze”! It contains inspirational stories from the authors but also, and maybe more importantly, numerous quotes from actual college students, which make this guide even more relatable and valuable.

The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed is wittily written and extremely entertaining as well as exhaustive, useful, and handy. It is written in a no-nonsense, delightful way. Advice is given but Jill and Dave Henry make sure students understand that they are not giving a “recipe”, a “diet” to be followed blindly, but are sharing sound advice to feel and learn better. First and foremost, the authors explore what students should do to be healthier. I particularly liked the food chapter but they are all important and well-designed. I highly recommend this comprehensive and engaging guide which is bound to help students get on the path of better health as they learn and graduate. Actually a must-read for teachers as well as students.

Jamie Michele

The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed: How to Manage Food, Booze, Stress, Sex, Sleep, and Exercise on Campus by Jill and Dave Henry is a self-help guide to assist readers in making the best choices possible when most people are on their own for the first time. Broken down into eight chapters described in the book's subtitle, the Henrys take a practical approach and allow for consideration of varied circumstances. These include serious issues such as the stages of intoxication and calculating one's estimated BAC to areas that may not feel like a big deal at first but will snowball if not nipped in the bud, such as emotional responses to stress, and tips on focusing on the things you can actually control.

Jill and Dave Henry do an excellent job in connecting the dots in a straightforward and easy to understand way in The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed. As a parent to a child who starts her first year of college in the fall, this book was of particular interest to me. I appreciate that there is no shying away from topics that are sometimes pushed aside. For example, there is an entire section dedicated to sexual consent. Further to this, there is no mincing of words with regard to what constitutes consent, and what to do if the unthinkable happens. From the point of view of a reader whose college days are no longer visible in the rear view mirror, I still found things that could be implemented into my daily life. Good running form to avoid injury on a jog and not being afraid to say no when I need some time to myself are just a couple of the nuggets I was able to take away. This is an excellent book and I can't imagine sending my daughter off in September without it.

Foluso Falaye

With no parents around to lay down rules and nobody to stop them if they wish to drink multiple shots at a frat party, many college students fall victim to substance abuse, peer pressure, sexual assault, obesity, depression, suicide, sleep deprivation, and more harmful phenomena. In The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed, Jill and Dave Henry share their tumultuous college experiences in a bid to help college students avoid the mistakes they made and witnessed others make. Readers will learn what being healthy actually means, strategies for thriving in their environment and developing good habits, how to eat healthily, how to consume alcohol responsibly, how to get enough sleep, how to be consistent with exercise, and how to manage stress.

I wished I'd read The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed when I was in school as the specific guidelines would have helped me avoid some mistakes I made back then. I especially loved the section that reveals how "we’re programmed to believe that health is all about physical appearance". Here, Jill and Dave Henry explain how nutrition and exercise are glamorized on social media but sleep, which is also important, is not. The instructions are quite practical and realistic, and readers are encouraged to take moderate measures and not extreme ones. With a combination of personal examples, research data, quotes from college students, and helpful illustrations, The Greatest College Health Guide You Never Knew You Needed is a well-constructed book perfect for students who wish to develop good, healthy habits in college while faced with serious temptation.