My Diet Analysis and Health Progress Essay

My Diet Analysis and Health Progress Essay We all know that eating right can help you maintain a healthy weight and avoid certain health problems, but your diet can also have a profound effect on your mood and sense of wellbeing. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, cooking meals at home, and reducing your intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates, on the other hand, may help to improve mood. Eating a healthy diet doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You just need to approach it in a different way trying to analyze what you are eating and how to control the intake of food and meals. Such diet analysis is a way to track the entire food one eats for a period of time and analyzes the foods eaten to determine the overall nutritional value of one’s dietary intake. It also helps to determine one’s diet “weak spots”, potential food allergies or diseasemanagement issues. To complete my nutritional analysis, I needed to fill in a 7 day food diary and created a plan for 3 weeks ahead. This was a learning experience on it’s own and helped me to think more about the food I was eating. I was pleased to learn that I met my nutritional requirements for energy, fluid, fibre and the majority of vitamins and minerals. This didn’t surprise me too much. As a person who cares about food I eat, I see food positively! Food to me is a wonderful and often unique combination of vitamins, minerals, carbs, protein, fat and fibre that my body needs to function. So, when I was analyzing my own diet, I created a key-focus area to control and revise and listed the tools to use to measure the food intake, calories counters and activity and exercise to keep on track of. I admit, I had to revise my diet analysis plus the exercises I did during this time as it is always good practice to listen to what your system tells you, isn’t it? Therefore, this helped me to decide what I am interested in: Food Groups (am I getting all of them?) Macronutrient Composition (what is the ratio and composition of carbs, proteins and fat?) Activity level (am I doing enough of exercises and in general Am I active enough?) Micronutrients of Concern: (am I getting enough?) More free time? Better grade? Click on this button nowOrder Now Next step was choosing the tool to analyse my diet or rather healthy eating plan. Trying to determine your intake of all nutrients of interest sounded pretty daunting. I read on the blogs for Dieticians that: “Using an online tool that you can use to input the nutrients of your food easily is really going to enable you to do quicker diet analysis.” And to my surprise it worked! I went through a lot of the materials in there and decided to stay with these two: FitDay and SuperTracker. Honestly, I liked FitDay better, because you could manually create foods, inputting each nutrient (great if you can’t find it in the database but have a nutrition label). SuperTracker, on the other hand, was not that flexible. I thought that it is limiting in the foods in its database, which for me was really tricky to overcome. I eat a lot of foods from in whole food form, but SuperTracker had a food database focused on more commercial food products. So in the end, I stayed with FitDay. During the process of my diet analysis, I realized that in some places I was consuming more than I should be and in some I was consuming less than I should be. I created three profiles for the diet analysis, and Iused each for one week each to analyze my diet and physical activities. I was able to input the foods I ate daily and also the physical activities I was involved in. During the course of the first week, I got tired easily. It was so hard on me because as I figured later I was not eating enough. I realized I took in less food containing carbohydrates and fats. During the second week, I lost the weight and felt stronger in general. The obstacle here was to discipline myself and follow the diet plan I created in the beginning of the week. I started to give myself a break: eating more of the “non-healthy food”, treated myself with alcohol. That was the reason why my weight didn’t want to get any lower: I was only able to maintain my weight. I took notes form what I did wrong and adjusted my eating plan for week 3. The last week of dieting went more or less easy for me. I have got myself under control, got used to the regime I established. Moreover, I got even more motivated when I saw the results of my diet: to my surprise, I didn’t actually achieve my goal of losing 2 pounds in a week, I lost 4 pounds! The hardest part in the end was to decide whether I should follow the plan or to give up on it. I decided to stop for awhile. I waited two week before I continued following the same diet plan I started with. And now I can say that I lost weight, I feel good and I am not even thinking of resigning from the diet plan I created. So after three weeks of dieting here are some numbers or the results of me being a healthy-eater: Energy â€" My intake was 2439 calories and my expenditure was 1961 calories leaving a negative energy balance of 478 calories. Protein â€" My goal was 254 to 753 with my actual intake being 212 which was below my goal. Vitamins and Minerals â€" My diet is lacking in those two. After three weeks my calcium was 41% and my iron was only 54% where the vitamin A was around 35% and vitamin C was 91%. This is based on an intake of 1961 calories per day. All in all I realized that healthy eating is not about strict dietary limitations, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. Rather, it’s about feeling great, having more energy, improving your health, and stabilizing your mood. I am a firm believer that your diet is the biggest component of your health and I wish to make continue to make it for the rest of my life.