Personalized Nutrition and Exercise Plan

1.     Final Project: Personalized Nutrition and Exercise Plan

·         Due Date: Day 7 [Individual] forum

·         Describe briefly a current health problem or nutritional need that you are experiencing, or a health or nutrition problem you can foresee experiencing because of your family history.

·         Develop a realistic nutrition and exercise plan to summarize in a 1,400- to 1,750-word paper. Use insights from the MyPyramid Plan Web exercise, the Recommended Dietary Allowances, Recommended Dietary Intakes for your age group and gender, and information from readings. The plan must be plausible enough to be initiated within the next 30 days and continued throughout your life.

·         Include the following:

• Identification of the health and nutrition problem that may be targeted
• Four nutritional or physical exercise goals
• Actions taken to meet each goal
• Anticipated setbacks or difficulties and approaches for overcoming them
• Outcomes by which to measure success
• Evidence of the plan’s effectiveness in addressing the identified problem or need
• Evaluation of potential health risks that may develop if the plan is not implemented

·         Address how your plan may be adjusted to fit your changing nutritional needs as a result of age, pregnancy (if applicable), or changes in physical capabilities.

·         Include information on physical activities, and how they may be altered to accommodate different seasons of the year and changes in age.

·         Format your paper according to APA standards.

·         Post your paper as an attachment(244).

            There are three health problems that I am experiencing or may experience in the future that I need to address and create a nutrition and exercise plan that will help me maintain or avoid these conditions.  These are: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.   All of these run in my family and I feel they are each linked together and each one affects the other two and I can not write a paper on one without addressing the other two. 

            The first one, obesity, is something I am experiencing now and have been trying to address with my current diet and exercise changes.  I have made several changes to my diet in recent months.  I have modified normal breakfasts from the work cafeteria by simply not getting them.  I bring my breakfast from home which is usually cereal or yogurt with fruit.  I also have incorporated special k granola bars or hard boiled eggs for snacks instead of chips or chocolate.  I chose yogurt and hard boiled eggs for their iodine content to ensure my thyroid is working properly and is not the reason for my weight.

 For dinner I usually keep baby spinach leaves, broccoli and carrots in my refrigerator.  I find by keeping these items on hand I am more likely use them by finding a way to incorporate them into a dinner in order to add more nutrition into mine and my family’s diet.  Even if only for the simplest reason of, to use it before it goes bad.  I add these extras to almost every dish I cook for dinner.  I find it is an easy way to give everyone a few more vegetable nutrients and the vegetables are masked in a way to make it acceptable for my kids. 

Then other change I have made to my diet recently is to add more vegetable nutrients into my diet by way of the amazing grass powder.  I drink one scoop of the amazing grass powder every morning with or before breakfast.  Their website claims each scoop is the nutritional equivalent to seven servings of vegetables and fruits.  Since beginning this there have been a few beneficial side effects, such as my insomnia is gone, I am more rested during the day.  My knees do not hurt as I walk up and down the stairs.  I also now take a women’s one a day tablet along with my fish oil vitamin. 

The exercise program I plan to add into my daily routine is a walk after dinner with my kids which I have already started in order to achieve my thousand daily steps, and I am buying a treadmill for my workout.  Walking is an easy routine for me and with limited time and space to walk or run long distances outside, a treadmill inside will allow me the freedom to walk or jog whenever is convenient for me and can easily be done after the kids go to bed or before the wake up with minimal embarrassment for me.  This is essential for my continued success at using the treadmill daily.  It does not have to interrupt any of my normal routines around the house and will take minimal effort at the start to make success within my grasp.

My second health issue is diabetes.  This disease runs very heavily in my family and I am currently starting to show signs that I should be tested in the near future. For a while I was getting shaky, lightheaded and felt like I was close to passing out.  The only fix was food.  Once I ate, I began to feel better.  It was only happening at lunch time and not every day.  Sometimes weeks would go by and I would not get the shakes.  For this reason it took me a while to pin point what was the cause, why some days and not others.   I narrowed it down to if the first thing I ate was any type of sugar and nothing else by lunch I would get shaky.  I stopped drinking soda and sugar laced coffee first thing in the morning and started drinking milk or juice.  After getting the amazing grass powder that became the first thing I ate or drank in the morning.  As long as I continue with this one rule about sugar, I have no issues throughout the day.  I have done a lot of research online since I am uninsured as to what the cause might be of this behavior and am almost convinced it is a form of diabetes, probably diet controlled diabetes.  I can still drink or eat as much sugar as I want to during the day with no shakes as long as the first thing I eat or drink is not sugar laced. 

This complication was the major reason for my purchase of the amazing grass powder.  This allows me a healthy alternative to drink in the morning and I do not have to worry about my vegetable intake for the rest of the day.  I still plan on getting tested to ensure what type of diabetes I have.  I am taking these warnings seriously since I know what diabetes can do if not properly handled.  I have a grandmother who died of this disease and she had many diabetes related health issues all her life.  Until I can get the testing done, this is my diet changes I have implemented in order to control the disease in myself. 

My third health issue which is just as linked and related to the other two and very prominent in my family history as well, is heart disease.  My grandfather died from his second heart attack in 1972.  My uncle has had a few minor heart attacks over the years, as well as my mother had a very mild attack a few years back.  Heart disease is known to be linked to obesity and diabetes and I am hoping in controlling the first two I will lessen my risk to develop any kind of heart disease later in life. 

I have run into a few complications that has thrown my diet eschew.  First is that we moved, and in moving we have all of our stuff locked into a storage unit while we stay with my stepfather-in-law while we look for our own place.  This adds to the risk of not being capable using my amazing grass powder every day as we adjust to living with someone else.  We spend two weeks on the road visiting relatives on the way south and this also made it hard to keep up using the powder and take our vitamins every day.  Our entire daily routines was thrown out of wack with the trip and move since we no longer had a refrigerator of our own and are not cooking our own meals.  This makes it hard to incorporate all of my vegetable techniques I was using to add more nutrients into our dinners. 

I have managed to maintain our daily after dinner walks, the only change there has been the addition of several members of this household in our nightly walks.  My continually success will be in the reduction of my overall weight and absence of the shakes I feel when not sticking to my rule of no sugar in the morning.  I also realize if I can not keep to these restrictions I could continue to gain weight and put more stress on my heart which can cause heart disease, or lose control of my potential diabetes and upgrade from diet controlled diabetes to insulin controlled diabetes.  This is not an alternative I would like since I do not like needles of any kind.  I do not want to be insulin controlled since that would limit me in many other ways and not be helpful with losing weight.  Many insulin dependent individuals only gain weight while taking insulin and as I am already one hundred pounds overweight this is not an option I would undertake willingly.  Adding weight will only increase my likelihood in developing heart disease and since my disease appears to be quite easily managed with diet control this should not be an issue if I keep to my current restrictions. 

It may also be that once I manage to lose the weight, I may lose my need to control my diet since it may be my overweight status that is causing my diabetes-like symptoms.  Only time will really tell how that will turn out but I am sure I can keep to the new diet and exercise plan I will implement.  Mostly in place besides the treadmill I plan on buying in the near future.