Healthy Eating, Nutrition, and Exercise Plan
Sarah Noble
SCI 241
October 21, 2012
Tiera Pack Lawyer

Healthy Eating, Nutrition, and Exercise Plan * Identify a current health problem or nutritional need you are experiencing, or a health or nutrition problem you can foresee experiencing because of your family history: for example, heart disease or diabetes. Briefly discuss the condition you have chosen.
Taking this class has opened my eyes to habits that my family practices that contribute to the majority of my family tree having to fight obesity. I hope to use what I have learned in this class to combat that issue in my life and pass this good behavior to my daughter. I would like to break this cycle of obesity in my family so I don’t have to worry so much about the health of my child, her children, and so forth. This peace of mind is a major goal of mine. I may not be able to help or fix my predecessors, but I can impact my offspring.
On both my mother’s and father’s side, most of the women are overweight. This has allowed each of them as individuals to have other health related problems that could be directly related to being overweight. My grandmother, on my dad’s side, has mobility issues due to bad knees and hips. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, also has mobility issues related to her knees and has to walk with a cane. Both my mother and my aunt, her sister, have had surgeries to correct some of their knee issues. Almost all of them have back pain. All of these symptoms and afflictions show the strain that being overweight puts on our bodies.
I am an emotional eater. When I am angry, down, or bored, I sometimes turn to food for company, so to speak. I have learned that “…eating is commonly used as a method of self- medication in response to negative emotional states...” [ (Taylor, 2010) ] which would explain some of my eating behavior. If I am going to break the obesity chain that is apparent in my family, I must find another outlet or fix for these low feelings. This will be a challenge. One report states “…current strategies to prevent and treat obesity are simply unable to override the basic evolutionary processes that have protected humans from starvation…” [ (Levitan, 2010) ] indicating that new ideas may be required to fix this problem. * Compare your results from this week to the 3-day diet analysis you completed in Week One. How have your nutritional habits changed since the first week of class? What key changes have you made to meet the recommendations made by your SuperTracker results?
My latest high calorie binge was reflected in my second 3-day diet analysis using the SuperTracker site [ (USDA) ]. Between dinner on Friday and again on Saturday, I ate a medium regular crust pizza with sausage and mushrooms from Domino’s®. While the SuperTracker site didn’t have the exact variety of pizza I ate in its database, it did reflect an estimated calorie intake of about 2400 calories split over two days. According to the tracker, this put me over my calorie budget on both days. It is these highly palatable foods, which are high in fat, are sweet, or are salty; that feed the natural reward centers of the brain [ (Taylor, 2010) ].
The SuperTracker also reflected that I was still low in dairy consumption when compared to my analysis from week 1. The results were slightly better since I have added one 5.3 oz. cup of Greek yogurt every day, but I still do not consume their recommended amount of this food group. The SuperTracker is limited in its results, however, since it does not allow for the input of a multivitamin, which I started taking over the last few weeks. This would cause my results to reflect a deficiency of some nutrients that may not be accurate. I also use an iPhone application, made by FitNow, Inc., called Lose It! to track my food. I prefer this application, which is also available online at loseit.com, because it allows me to scan the barcode on an