Wellness and Fitness... 

              Healthy meal choices...

 

In Wellness and Fitness, I have grown in my ability to make changes to a meal so that it is healthy and helps me prevent diseases caused by unhealthy eating choices. While answering the question, “How can we reduce the risk of obesity in the DRSS community?”.

 

 One learning endeavor that supported my growth is the Healthy Living Unit where we created a healthy part or whole meal to help the students in the STEM community make better choices when they are going to eat.

 

The purpose of this project was to make it so that I could make better choices when selecting food when I am at the store or when I am making food for other people.  By making these choices, I will be able to help my family and therefore prevent them from developing diseases such as diabetes or heart disease caused by unhealthy eating.

 

In order to complete this project, we had to learn about diseases that develop in our body because of bad nutrition or because of a lack of exercise such as heart disease and diabetes. After learning about these diseases, we learned how they affected our body and what they did that was bad, such as clogging arteries that carry blood. If these are clogged our heart has to pump harder to get the blood to flow properly increasing the risk of heart disease.

 

Next we learned about what vitamins and minerals do for our body and why we should get the recommended daily amounts, for example getting enough calcium is vital because if helps promote healthy bone health and if you don’t get enough then you could have weak bones that could break easily. After learning about vitamins and minerals we learned about how to make a healthy meal that still tasted good. Once we learned how to make a good meal we made a healthy meal to pitch to our teachers that would convey to them our idea, and try to get them to accept it. If our teachers accepted our idea than we would get to start writing our script to say to the students once they got into our class. Finally we ran our healthy meal plan with the kids to help show them how easy it is to be healthy. Mine was an event to teach the students how to make a smoothie that had lots of nutrition that was easy and cheap to make afterschool.

 

 

One artifact from this project is the power point that we had to make to pitch our healthy meal plan to the teachers. This artifact relates to the project and my growth because this is what we had to make to show the teachers that our plan was going to be successful. This power point contained all of the information that we had to pitch to our teachers to get them to accept our event. This power point also had our budget information so that out teachers would know that we were under or over budget so they would know if they could fund us or not. This power point also showed our class mates what we were doing for our event which they gave us feedback on to create the final product.

 

Another artifact that supports my growth with this project would be my meal modification quiz. This quiz showed that I was able to make a healthy meal out of one that was not originally healthy. This would also help prevent diseases such as heart disease or diabetes caused by the original foods that were in the meal. We had 2 choices of meal to modify on the quiz. The one I chose had several things to improve but I am going to focus on the cream based salad dressing because I changed it to Italian to lower the levels of ldl (Low density lipids) or bad cholesterol in our body. Changing this lowers ldl levels because it is getting rid of the dairy in the dressing which contains bad cholesterol. Another less complicated change I made to the meal was changing the iceberg lettuce to spinach because it is a dark green with fiber (cellulose, a complex sugar from plants that our body cannot process.) that helps us digest food and push it through our body healthily which will help decrease the risk of diabetes since it is slows the digestion of sugar.