My Personal Diet Modification

Over the last several blogs I have talked about scientific and not so scientific reasons as to why we are the way that we are in terms of weight and health.  I have issued a few challenges that I know have helped me personally and I wanted to share with you now my own personal diet and my strengths and weaknesses in regards to my own nutrition in the hopes that it will help you if you find yourself in a dietary rut.

 

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In order to show you just how bad I was before this class started, I am going to have to share with you my not so good eating habits.  This picture made me laugh so hard because unfortunately that  describes me very well when it comes to cake or chocolate.  In a work week (Monday – Friday) I would not eat breakfast and for lunch I would eat at one of the fast food restaurants in town.  My lunch would either be a chicken sandwich or hamburger with fries and occasionally I would find myself at the Mexican restaurant in town eating a burrito with chips and salsa.  Then for dinner I would usually fix something that was quick and easy without paying any attention to the calories.  And if there was anything that had chocolate in it, I would eat it.  As far as physical activity, I might walk two miles once a week if any.  Needless to say my habits were horrible and explain why I had put on a little weight.

Being that I wanted to be a good role model for my son and that I wanted to live a longer healthier life, I decided that it was time to start making some changes.  

Source: http://teresawarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/my-fitness-pal.png

The first change I made was to install My Fitness Pal on my phone so that I could visually see what I was eating in terms of calories.  My next step for modifying my diet was to start eating breakfast.  While my breakfast isn’t perfect, it is healthy.  I have been eating yogurt or a granola bar

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and it really holds me over until lunch time.   

At lunch I have stopped eating French fries and I have stopped eating a lot of fried anything.  My new lunch looks more like a salad with lean protein and nuts on top and at first I was hungry like two hours later but after a month I can tell a difference not only in my waistline but in my energy levels as well.  Dinner is still a work in process but for the most part I have been eating lean proteins and really paying attention to the food labels.

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These changes are not perfect and they do not put me where I need to be but I can say that since starting this I have lost ten pounds and I feel better than I have since before I had my son.  I have also tried to start walking more regularly and taking a multivitamin.  Along with the weight loss, I have more energy, I feel more focused and my blood pressure has lowered.  Again these changes are just my beginning because I know in order to be my best I still have a lot of work left to do.

If you have read all of the blogs I have posted thus far and you have not learned anything from them, I do hope that you may at least have gained the motivation to start your own transformation into the healthier you.

The nutritional requirements across the lifespan – from pregnancy to childhood, and from adolescence to adulthood

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If you are still reading, pat yourself on the back because you have made it through six of my blog posts on nutrition.  They may or may not have helped you but I do hope you can say that you at least learned one new thing that you didn’t know before.

Last time I challenged myself and you to only eat fast food once for the whole week.  How did you do?  I did not pass but I will say that both times I went to Wendy’s, I ate a salad which is good for me considering what I usually go for when I head to Wendy’s.  Not eating at the fast food restaurants is going to be a challenge that I will have to continue to work on.

For this blog post I wanted to share one of my last homework assignments from my nutrition class that discusses the nutritional requirements across the lifespan beginning with pregnancy.

 

Source: http://maternityinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/food-during-pregnancy11.jpg

When women are expecting, the nutrition choices that they make on a daily basis not only affect their own health but also the health of the developing baby.  When women do not eat enough healthy food and do not gain enough weight during their pregnancy, they are more likely to have a baby with a low birth weight (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 511).  A baby’s birth weight is the most potent single indicator of an infant’s health (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 512).  During pregnancy, a woman requires an additional 340 daily calories in her second trimester and an extra 450 each day during the third (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 515).  In addition, women are also encouraged to increase their intake of folate from 400 to 600 micrograms a day, as well as getting more B12, vitamin D, Iron and Zinc (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 518).

In the infancy stage, water is one of the most important nutrients to keep an infant healthy (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 533).

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  Other nutrients that infants need more of than adults are Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin C and Iodine (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 534). 
In childhood, I found it interesting that it is suggested for children ages 1-6 to eat 800 calories a day, kids 6 to 10 need about 1,600 calories a day and then by the age of 10 they need 1,800 calories a day (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 555).  For anyone with children, you know that there are days where your child hardly eats anything and then there are others where they are like the hungry, hungry hippo.  My child definitely fluctuates between those two extremes.

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In adolescence, bones and organs are still developing and need more vitamins and nutrients that both children and adults.  In adolescence it is recommended that the adolescent had an increased intake of iron, calcium and vitamin d (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 572).

Once your reach adulthood, you start to realize how important it is to eat a healthy diet because that diet is directly affecting your life span.  You no longer need excessive amounts of the same vitamins you did when you were younger and now you need more of certain nutrients that you didn’t need before like fiber.

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If we start eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle from the beginning stages of life to the end, we will have developed these healthy eating styles and they will continue to stick with us throughout our lives.  Just think, it is harder to break the habit of a learned behavior therefore if we start eating right from the beginning breaking that habit will be harder as we age.

The consequences of not eating healthy are numerous.  Not eating healthy can cause stress, fatigue, depression, being overweight or obese, tooth decay, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, some cancers, and eating disorders (SA Health, 2015).

Nutrition plays a huge part in how we grow and develop and I know that over the course of my class, I learned a lot that I did not know.  I have also taken what I learned and utilized it in my own diet which I will tell you more about in my next blog.


SA Health. (2015). The risks of poor nutrition.  Retrieved from http://www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/public+content/sa+health+internet/healthy+living/is+your+health+at+risk
       /the+risks+of+poor+nutrition
Sizer, F. & Whitney, E. (2013).  Nutrition: Concepts and Controversies (13th ed.).  Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

The role of diet in preventing underweight, overweight, and obesity

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Your weight and height play a large role in determining what is a healthy weight for you to be.  Together, those two numbers make up your body mass index aka your BMI.  Being overweight means that your total BMI is between 25 to 29.9, being underweight means that a person would have a BMI below 18.5 (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, p. 335).  A good chunk of the patients that I interact with at my job are obese.  This means that their BMI is over 30 (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, p. 336).  When I see them it is not always because they are seeking a nutritionist or a diet and fitness program but more because they have been obese for so long other aspects of their health are deteriorating.

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Due to the fact that a good chunk of America is either overweight or obese, we have all heard what implications arise from maintaining a lifestyle like that.  Overweight and obese people have too much body fat and are at a much greater risk of developing heart disease and various other chronic illnesses that can shorten their life span.

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In order to make America and other countries healthier there does need to be some preventative action taken.  While childhood obesity is a big issue in America right now, children learned to be obese by their loved ones.  Some may not agree with that statement but I see it at least once a week with my own eyes.  Parents and grandparents give in to the begging of their children and grandchildren and allow them to eat nothing but junk, they allow them to sit around watching television or playing video games for hours on end.  This is the behavior that needs to stop.  

Since being healthy has not seemed to work as a motivator for a lot of Americans, there needs to be something that they will care about at stake.  Something that will make us get off the couch and out of the drive thru line.  Unfortunately a lot of the time it takes a major health event that will land us in the hospital that gives us the wake-up call that we need to make a change.

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One article that I found interesting about how to control the obesity epidemic stated that, “Why continue a treatment with such a failure rate? Perhaps we have stuck with the weight loss paradigm because we cannot imagine another way to health. However, one option is to De-emphasize weight and instead focus on the behaviors of healthy living. That would be a focus on health at every size.” (Bliss, 2011)  I really liked her take on this because truthfully, in the eleven years that I have worked in healthcare I have seen people of all shapes and sizes.  Just because a person might weigh more does not mean that they are in poorer health than a smaller sized person.  

Your diet plays a major role in whether you are underweight, overweight or obese.  Granted there are individuals out there that no matter what they eat they can’t gain weight.  For the majority of us though, that is not the problem.  Eating nothing but McDonald’s or Wendy’s will eventually make you overweight or even obese.  Learning how to cook healthier meals at home using fresh ingredients will help you maintain a healthy weight and improve your overall health.

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I did not issue a challenge at the end of my last blog but I do have a challenge for you this time.  If you eat at a fast food restaurant more often than not this challenge will be a little more difficult.  This week I challenge not just myself but you to limit yourself to eating at a fast food restaurant only once for the whole week.  It doesn’t sound too hard right?

Bliss, K. (2011). Ending the war on obesity and starting a new peace movement. 

      Psyccritiques, 56(25), doi:10.1037/a0023989

Sizer, F. & Whitney, E. (2013).  Nutrition: Concepts and Controversies (13th ed.).  Mason, 
      OH: Cengage Learning.

Digestion, absorption, and metabolism of the macronutrients (carbohydrate, protein, and fat)

After my last blog post, I issued the challenge of eating foods rich in macro- and micro-nutrients or to start taking a multivitamin.  I ended up going with the daily multivitamin and I can honestly say that I feel better a week into taking them.  I feel like I have more energy and my mind is more focused and sharper.  After my last discussion about what macro- and micro-nutrients are, I wanted to follow up in this post with the digestion, absorption and metabolism of macro-nutrients.

Source of picture: http://www.health-lesson-plans-teacher.com/images/DigestiveProcessPic1.jpg

Your digestive tract is actually one of the first things that is formed when your body is being made as an embryo, it is made up of a flexible muscular tube that transfers food from one end of your body to the other (The Digestive System).  More specifically, this tube extends from the mouth to the throat, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and rectum to the anus creating about twenty six feet of travel for your food to go before it evacuates your body (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, pg. 82).  The main purpose of the digestive tract is to ensure that our body receives the vital nutrients that we need in order to grow and thrive.

 

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Your body is a machine that engages several of its organs and muscles to work together so that a person can digest their food.  Once you eat something, it can stay in your digestive tract for as long as three days before your body fully digests it (The Digestive System).   The small particles that your food gets broken down to contain the macro-nutrients your body needs.  

Carbohydrates begin their digestive process in the mouth where they are chemically digested with the enzyme salivary amylase that breaks down the carbs into maltose, maltotriose and limit dextrin (Cummings, 2015).  Protein begins to gets digested and absorbed into the stomach by the enzyme pepsin.  Most of the chemical digestion and almost all of the absorption of the vital nutrients takes place in the small intestine; this includes carbohydrates, proteins and fats (Cummings, 2015).  Pancreatic digestive enzymes are good enough on their own to digest the carbohydrates and proteins that you eat and then pancreatic lipase is essential for the majority of fat digestion and once the macro-nutrients have been digested and absorbed they aid the liver in metabolism (Cummings, 2015).   

That was a lot of scientific talk but essentially, your body is a machine.  When you eat the proper foods and absorb the right nutrients, your body functions at its best and will work like the well-oiled machine it was created to be.

Cummings, Benjamin.  (2015).  The Digestive System.  Retrieved from http://bk.psu.edu

     /clt/bisc4/ipweb/misc/assignmentfiles/digestive/Digestion_Absorption.pdf

Sizer, F. & Whitney, E. (2013).  Nutrition: Concepts and Controversies (13th ed.).  Mason, 

     OH:Cengage Learning.

The Digestive System. YouTube.  Retrieved from

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xKYNz9AS0&feature=related