Food/Activity Journal

Keeping a food and activity journal has been a pretty interesting experience. I have never really documented my own eating or exercise habits very closely. The use of a food log was very useful to realize trends in my eating habits and just how much I actually consume each day. For the first few days, I realized that I had pretty much the exact same thing for breakfast and lunch, with the only differing meal being dinner. This led me to my simple goal of trying to eat more of a variety of things for breakfast. I achieved my goal by not having Honey Nut Cheerios every morning and ate things like English muffins, eggs, sausage, and blueberry bread. Keeping a food journal that wasn’t super detailed was a quick and easy way to be able to check what I had been eating throughout the day and allowed me to judge how healthy or unhealthy I had been eating. I enjoyed keeping track of the foods that I ate and it was eye-opening to see all of the variety of foods I might eat in a day.  If we were required to record serving sizes or keep track of the nutritional values of everything we ate, the practice of keeping a food journal would be much less appealing. While there was value in keeping the food journal, I felt like keeping track of the activity wasn’t nearly as valuable. The majority of my activity was time spent exercising in the gym so looking back on what my activity was over the past week wasn’t all that exciting.

 I think using a food and activity journal would be a great tool for students to use. It would open up opportunities to talk about the importance of a healthy diet and the benefits of exercising and staying active. This seems like a good way to help students become conscious about what they’re eating and possibly help them avoid eating excess junk food. It would be neat if the students were to keep a food journal for a couple weeks in order to give them a really good sense of how much they eat and then show them a “food journal” or typical diet of someone who doesn’t have very much. This would allow for creating a bridge between health and social studies. This could lead to exploring conditions of poverty and perhaps helping students become more appreciative of what they do have. While it may be difficult to tell students that they need to eat healthy foods since that is more controlled by what their parents can provide for them, it is possible to make the activity section of the journal into a homework assignment in which they need to do something active every day and record it. Overall, I like the idea of using the food journal in a classroom setting and I’m sure I’ll try and find a place for it at some point during my teaching career.