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!