This week I began to try and focus on not eating anything after dinner, and if I ate something after dinner I made sure that it was something healthy like an apple. This was very successful for the first week of trying it, I never found myself even really needing to eat an apple, I just ate dinner and then called it a night with food. I came up with doing this idea because I have found out that eating right before bed is the time when you gain the most calories because you are doing the least exercise.
I believe that this goal of eating less junk foods is something that is very achievable for me based off of how the last three blog posts have gone. I did struggle at first, but right now it seems that it is becoming something that I am starting to be able to do with ease. My first couple of goals were to stop eating when I came home from lacrosse, and to stop eating junk food after dinner. With these goals not being so hard to reach, I want to try and reach a goal that will be a lot harder than that. One thing that I am hoping to do is to start bringing healthy lunches to work instead of going to the places to eat that are around me. Although there are some healthy places to eat around me, packing my own healthy lunch is the only certain way to know that I will not be eating any junk food. This goal will be hard for me, as it will result in me needing to wake up earlier to make my lunch but I do think that if I can reach this goal it will be a very big step.
The only flaw that I have thought about so far when it comes to trying to reach my goal is that when I do move back into school, it will be MUCH harder to eat healthier. Even the healthy options at the dining halls are not very healthy. At school I try and eat the quickest food that I can get at the dining hall so that I can go about my day without sitting in the dining hall for an hour. I am going to try and focus on buying salads and putting them in my fridge until dinner time so I can avoid the unhealthy dining hall foods all together.
Chapter 7
One very interesting thing that chapter 7 talked about was the consumption of alcohol among college students, and how that trend is not going down and does not seem to be going down any time soon. This is the first thing that I bring up because when it comes to eating healthy, drinking bud lights is probably the most unhealthy thing that you could do. This is why people call stomachs the “beer belly,” because it is actually known to cause people to gain a very large amount of weight if they drink too much. I believe that one of the key factors in eating healthy would be staying away from alcohol and making sure that I am taking every step necessary to eat healthy.
Tobacco was something that was brought up right after alcohol was talked about, this does not cause you to gain weight, but it is unhealthy so I thought that it would be a topic to talk about. Although weight is not the issue, people can truly die from tobacco and nobody is untouchable. There are so many different long term and short term risks to using tobacco including cancer. One thing that is very interesting is that obviously tobacco is found in cigarettes, but even if you don’t smoke you could get lung issues just by being around the people that are smoking. There are so many hazards to smoking that it is truly not worth it, and people should really think about quitting if they currently smoke right now. With tobacco there is also “dip” which can very easily cause you to get mouth cancer. Once again, these are not things that are necessarily unhealthy weight wise, but they are so unhealthy in general that I thought I would bring it up as a topic of interest.
Chapter 8
The most interesting thing that chapter 8 brought up was how important each nutrient is to us. One thing that is very important is water. Water is something that makes up around 55 percent of our body weight meaning that we should always be drinking water to stay healthy. Water is also something that could help lose weight because then you will have the energy to actually work out and try and lose weight on a daily basis. For me, I am trying to eat healthy then water is very important. I should be having water with every meal instead of going and drinking soda or other drinks that are unhealthy.
Chapter 8 also talked about nutrients as in carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins. In this chapter they brought up the importance of each thing to us in our daily lives. One thing that is important is that we do not have too many fats. Although fats are important for us to survive, we should not be having too many. When talking about eating healthy this chapter was actually very helpful because it told me exactly what should be in my food when it comes to the things that were listed above. It told me how much I should be eating, and when it is going to be considered too much.
Chapter 9
Chapter 9 was all about things like weight, which is something that is very important to my goal of eating healthy. The first thing that I want to talk about is obesity. The chapter focused on this for a little while, and it was shocking realizing how many people in the US and even in other countries are obese. Obesity is an epidemic in the US that has to be stopped before it is too late. Obesity basically means that you are just about non-stop eating and gaining weight. This is very important to all of us because no one wants to eat so much that they are considered obese, and once you start it is very hard to stop. For me, it is nowhere near the obese scale, but I still want to be able to eat healthy before I do start to gain weight from the way that I am eating. There are so many risk factors to obesity, and you could actually end up getting diabetes from obesity.
Another thing that this chapter spoke about was how to actually lose weight, and how some people tend to go the way of surgery. That route is not something you want to take, and you should try and exercise and eat healthy if you are trying to lose wight. It is very important that we all exercise the right amount each day, and then do not just go home and eat when we are bored. Weight loss is something that is very crucial in most peoples lives, and we should all be doing it the right way and not just going under a knife to try and lose weight and be risking our lives.
