Once in a while I will buy something on the expensive side but I’m good with money so I know when it’s okay to splurge on organic foods. Generally good nutrition is important for everyone, but it’s especially important for college students. As a college student, I need a healthy diet so that my body can run properly with enough fuel to get through the day. Since college is so stressful and demanding at times, it’s important that our bodies are fueled enough to keep up with the stress. I’m starting to see how important it is to have a healthy diet throughout college.
It’s surprising how many young people have health issues because they didn’t pay attention to their health during the young college years. According to Skidmore College, good nutrition is important for being able to live a healthy life now and in the future. Even if weight is not a concern at the moment, overall poor nutrition habits are linked to negative future health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, anemia and other cancers. Overall, poor nutrition can greatly impact your daily well-being in terms of feeling your best physically and mentally.
Without proper utrition, the student’s body does not run efficiently and they are more prone to feeling lethargic, depressed and physically ill. Anxiety may also increase as the student focuses more on school then they do on their own health. School is important but health is even more important. This report represents my Three Day Log for which I had to record everything I ate and drank during the day, along with how I felt before and after each meal. I remembered what I had each day and how I felt. It was really surprising to put that into the Super Tracker and let the website analyze my calories and my information.
So, l’ll be discussing how my diet varies between the weekdays and the weekends and how often I skip meals and how it impacts my overall health. This project has been quite a process but I’ve learned more about my diet and the impact that it has on my health. I’ve never cared much about my nutrition but as time went on, I realized that being healthy doesn’t just depend on personal genetics, it also depends on how the person eats, sleeps, and exercises. In this paper, I report my analysis of my food selection over a 3-day period during April 10-13, 2016.
Honestly, the 3-day period isn’t typical for my diet at all. Two of the three days that I chose I was at the school all day so my availability for food was very limited. AlL I had around me was coffee so whenever I was hungry or it was around lunch and dinner time, l’d get coffee and creamers along with sugar because it was convenient and nearby and it was the only thing available to me. I could have easily gone to the bookstore to get something to eat but I didn’t want to take time away from my studies nor was I fond of the prices.
It’s also seldom that the only thing I would eat all day is at 9:00 at night. Plus, I never have three cups of coffee in one day. I’m normally anxious so I try to not drink too much coffee as coffee only enhances the feeling of nervousness more. Referring to my Food Log, I also went to the Empire Cafe which rarely happens as well and it’s good to have a balance instead of only sweets for lunch. Dinner is usually normal; ‘llmake myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because it’s something I’ve grown very fond of, it’s convenient and it doesn’t have a lot of calories.
Another reason why my diet is so different is because on Sunday, I ate a whole lot. I usually don’t eat much on the weekends because I tend to forget to add eating to my chedule. Perhaps a snack in between work outs because it would be hard to exercise for a few hours without eating in between. I know this from experience. I’ve gone two hours or more with straight exercising because I wanted to see how long my energy would last. Exercising is a great way of letting go the body’s fight-or-flight response.
The body has so much energy that sometimes it doesn’t know how to get rid of all of it besides going into a panic attack. However, over exercising isn’t so good either. It’s easy to burn out quickly. I believe the American diet consists of pizza, hamburgers, pasta and toast. At least that is the way it seems to me. As a student, there are budget and time restrictions and all of the dishes named are easy to prepare, generally inexpensive and overall good in taste. Some students don’t have the time it takes to cook certain foods because they range from 40 minutes to 2 hours.
I got into the habit of this diet because I never really learned how to cook and I have usually had a high metabolism to boot. One time my dad and myself when to McDonalds after school where I got a fries and a milkshake. After we ate and went home, my family ate spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. I didn’t gain a single ound from that day. Now, however, I have to watch what I am eating because my metabolism has slow down since then. So while my diet isn’t exactly the healthiest, for a student, it is cheap, easy to make and allows me to continue on to my other duties quicker and not hungry.
Even though I don’t really know how to cook, there are a few recipes I’ve pulled from the Healthy College Cookbook. One of these recipes is peanut butter oatmeal which takes about 5 minutes to prepare and it’s very filling. Other things I’ve made are chocolate chip muffins, spice loaf cake and even blondie bars. With my grandmother coming o the US from Portugal this summer, I am hoping to broaden my knowledge of cooking so that way I can actually cook a full and nutritious meal by myself. My grandmother is one of the best cooks in my family who I’d love to be able to learn from.
Nowadays, my diet varies greatly on weekends from week days. The weekends are usually my workout days so my meals so usually I eat something that’s available or easy to make, such as my aforementioned peanut butter oatmeal. Other times, I’ll heat up some premade soup that’s low in calories. During the weekdays however, ill drink mostly coffee because it’s nearby nd I like it. One trend I’ve picked up wherever I go is to choose the cheapest items. I know it sounds silly because it does sacrifice healthiness, but that is my first thought when I go shopping.
When I am at the school however, my food not only has to fit in my budget, but it also has to be quick to eat and filling, that way I don’t have to think about preparing anything to eat. Another bad habit I have been in is skipping meals way too often. From grade school to high school, whenever I would eat breakfast I would get really sick. So to avoid that, I would skip breakfast completely. Now l’ll eat a snack or something light in the morning before entering the shower. I am slowly getting better at making sure I get all 3 meals a day.
Skipping meals isn’t healthy for the body because the body runs on food for fuel during the day. Since I usually skip meals, I can say that quality has gone down in my diet. I skipped a lot of meals last semester which really screwed up the way my diet was. The more meals that I skipped, the more my health over all started to sink. I’ve learned that skipping meals can really affect someone’s academic, health and social life. This semester, I still skip meals ut I replace them with snacks. It’s just hard to eat three full meals throughout the day but l’m eating more than I used to so it’s a progress.
According to Appendix C, we had to go by a code of why we chose certain foods to eat. The code really helped me realize why I was eating certain foods. The code indications are: personal reference, habit or tradition, social pressure, availability, convenience, economy, health value and advertising. Luckily, I didn’t have to use the social pressure code. Nobody should ever have to feel pressured to eat a certain food. The common codes that I used in my Food Log were personal eference, habit or tradition, availability, economy, and health value.
During the weekend, the foods I ate were commonly associated with personal preference, convenience, and habit or tradition. I didn’t have to worry about the food being affordable because I wasn’t going out to eat at a restaurant. I mainly used the code “habit or tradition” for the weekend because what I eat on the weekend usually stays the same. For the week days, the codes that I used were economy and availability. Most of the food and drinks during the day were both that I could afford and they were available at the time. I enjoy when food is available because I can get a bite to eat then go back to my school work.
For the second part of my report, I had to log on to my SuperTracker to record all that I ate and I got to discover what nutrients I was missing throughout my diet. Adequacy is defined as “the dietary characteristic of providing all of the essential nutrients, fiber, and energy in amounts sufficient enough to maintain health and body weight. “(11) According to Appendix A, I did not meet my daily requirements for energy, protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. For calories, my average aten caloric intake was 996 calories, although my target from SuperTracker is 2,000 calories.
My daily requirement for protein was 46 grams, but I was under at 26 grams. What surprised me about my Nutrient Report was that in percentage, my protein intake was okay while my actual protein intake was low. I thought my protein percentage and intake would both have the “under” category from SuperTracker. Also according to SuperTracker, my minerals and vitamins were considerably under the requirements. Both my vitamin D and E intake were at two ug when it needed to be 15 ug. It’s hard for me to ncorporate vitamins and minerals into my daily life.
However, two minerals I were spot on with. I managed to eat the recommended amount of 1. 1 grams of Thiamin and Riboflavin. It surprised me to see that SuperTracker was okay with some of food that I ate. As this project went on, I’m realizing how important my diet is for my overall health and well-being. Balance is something that’s important to have in daily life, but not everybody gets it. According to Sizer and Whitney, being able “to provide foods of a number of types in preparation to each other in proportion, so that foods rich in some nutrients can do not crowd out
