Getting the Food Ball Rolling

So, one of the reasons I started this blog was because a lot of people wanted a source of nutrition advice. A place to find meal plans, grocery shopping ideas, etc. I haven’t done the best at this. Mostly because my personal focus has been school, training for the half marathon, and personal finance goals. I think it’s time to get the ball rolling on this section of the blog.

I think a good place to start is the introduction of MyPyramid. If you’re anywhere close to my age, you probably learned the Food Guide Pyramid when you were a kid in school or even in college. Well, the Food Guide Pyramid is extinct. The new myPyramid has some fantastic symbolism and well chosen verbiage that is explained on the USDA website. If you go to the myPyramid food tracker page, you can enter your age, height, weight, and activity level for a personalized daily food guide.

My personalized plan looks something like this:

About 2200 kcal made up of

7 oz grains

3 cups veggies

2 cups fruit

3 cups dairy

6 oz meat/beans

The number of servings may be cryptic at first, but if you poke around a bit there is more info available. I think using ounces of grains is a bit odd, but the website has all the info you need to translate 1 ounce equivalents of grain based foods. For example, 1 slice of bread is a 1 ounce grain equivalent.

I will post my food intake as many days as I can remember in effort to show you what following MyPyramid looks like. I am less than perfect, so I’m not saying that I’ll be able to meet the plan every day. Let’s just see how it works! I think I’ll keep the running log on the side bar for now, but I hope to turn this into a planning section to help readers find meal ideas to meet their own goals! 

Kids in the Hall

Today I got to talk to seniors in high school about nutrition. Actually I ended up talking to them about nutrition and traveling. The whole thing went even better than I expected. The teacher was my phys ed and health class teacher back in the day. Over 10 years ago. Craziness. It was fun to go back to my old stomping grounds though for sure. Telling kids that I'm in grade 24 always gets me the funniest looks. I think the young people were boggled when I told them how much our country spends on obesity related health care costs each year. Their guesses were $30-100 million, when in fact it's somewhere over $75 billion. BILLION! Their nutrition questions were all very genuine. We had a great discussion about fruits and vegetables. They were also curious about things like snacks before sports practice, acai berry, and soda vs. juice. Several of them like to cook which made me happy! Maybe one will be a dietitian some day! They were the cutest when they were asking me about traveling. They wanted to know about foods I've eaten, how I dealt with language barriers, and the best was when a really quiet kid asked if I got homesick. Heck yeah, I used to get crazy homesick! Ah, the joys of youth. To think back when I was their age I happily exercised 5 hours a day or more and still managed to make it through an 8 hour school day. Not sure how that worked. No way I could do that now!