Checking Your Homework

Okay so when talking about nutrition and fitness it's always nice to have some reading material that you can refer back to you. I have three texts that I like to refer to when I have questions or need encouragement about my nutrition or my fitness. The first is my personal training textbook, "Fitness the Complete Guide" by Frederick C Hatfield, PhD. The second is "Total Nutrition the Only Guide You'll Ever Need" from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. And finally the third is "You on a Diet The owners manual for waste management" by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. and yes it's Oprah's one and only doctor Oz. Since you all kept track of everything you've been eating for the past week, I'm now going to break down what you should be eating to see how close your week lines up. According Total Nutrition there is a 3-5-7 rule of good nutrition. 3 means three keywords (moderation, variety and balance) anything for the most part is okay as long as it's within moderation, you don't want to go out and eat two packages of cookies a day, but the occasional indulgence is perfectly fine. 5 stands for your five basic food groups, and 7 talks about seven dietary guidelines (which we'll talk about later). According to Total Nutrition by following this 3-5-7 setup you will give your body everything that it needs to function in a healthy way. So let's talk about the five basic food groups: as an adult it is recommended that you get two servings of milk, two servings of meat, three servings of vegetables, two servings of fruit, and six servings of grain. According to Total Nutrition an adult is anyone that's 25 years of age or over,(And we were all so happy to turn 21!) Teenagers to young adults (11 years of age to 24 years of age) have the following recommended health guide lines: four serving of milk, two servings of meat, three servings of vegetable, two servings of fruit and six servings of grain. Now let's add up the amount of milk, meat, vegetables, fruit and grains that you ate for each day, and compare it to the recommended servings that you should be getting. Any discrepancies is a good place for you to start improving your diet. Something else you might want to invest in is a really good calorie counting book. These books give you the amount of calories that are in some of your favorite foods, and a really good one will give you the amount of calories in some of your favorite fast foods. If some of you only knew the amount of calories in the things we all love to eat the most, you would cut them out of your diet in a nano second. So Shop around, because it is impossible to know the amount of calories you are taking in without some sort of guide. And if you don't know what you're putting into your body how could you possibly expect to see changes. For those of you at home that already have a good calorie counter, I want you to go through and write down the amount of calories that you ate at each meal. When you finish with that add them up for the entire day and compare it to the amount of calories your burning. For those of you trying to lose weight let's see if the number is less then what your are burning. If so, great job! For the rest of us, hey it's just the first week and even I didn't do as well as I would've liked. But, Sunday marks the start of a new week and with a new week brings a new promise of hope to do a little bit better then last week. Remember slow and steady wins the race! Until Wednesday happy eating!