My Personal Healthy Diet and Exercise Plan

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After recording and analyzing my food and drink intake for three days, I was fairly shocked with my results. Before, I considered myself to be a healthy eater. I do not skip meals, and I try to get a good variety of different things. I try to include fruits and veggies, and I usually stay away from fast food. However, after looking at my actual intake of macronutrients and micronutrients as compared to the recommended dietary allowances (RDA), I realized that some things need to change in order to reclassify myself as a “healthy eater”.
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My distribution of macronutrients—protein, carbohydrates, and fat—were a little bit different than what I had expected. Since coming to college, I have found myself accidentally eat less meat products, not because I want to be a vegetarian or anything, but it has just happened that way. Because of this, I thought that my protein levels may be a little below the RDA; however they ended up being 132% my recommended value.

This is most likely because I consume a lot of nuts, legumes, and soy products. Both my carbohydrate and fat levels were under the RDA for me.
I was pretty surprised about this mostly because I feel like I eat bread all the time. However, when calculated on my energy balance sheet, I found that the percentage of calories I get from carbohydrates and fats is relatively close to the recommended. In addition to this, I was happy that my fiber intake was within my recommended amount.
I do eat a lot of dried fruit and different grain products, so this was probably helpful with the fiber level. I also found that the different types of fat (saturated, unsaturated, trans) were all within healthy ranges. Because of these things I feel that this aspect of my diet is of lesser concern than others. One of the most clarifying parts of this project was my energy balance.
Before this, I just assumed that I hit around the 2000 calorie mark because that is usually the daily value reference value for nutrition labels, but my data indicated otherwise. When I initially put the food into the computer program, my calorie levels for each of the three days were in the 1900s—and I never count calories. It surprised me to see that all of the numbers happened to be about the same, which gave me a three day average of 1940 kcal. When I calculated the recommended calorie value using the weight management equation and the activity factors, I got 2672 kcal.
My first thought is, “this explains so much, this is why I’m always so tired!” While this may or may not be the cause, it definitely means that I have a pretty strongly negative energy balance. To fix this, I will need to add more healthy foods to my diet so that I am consuming closer to my recommended amount of calories each day. I do know that I should not achieve this by adding high calorie junk food, though. Now for the segment I am a little ashamed about: the micronutrients. Really, the only one that I was not too surprised to see was my sodium level, which I knew would be high. I
am bad about eating sauces, ramen noodles, and salted grits—all of which have high salt contents. In the future to help combat this, I am eating unsalted nuts, low sodium peanut butter, and using half of the flavor packet in the ramen noodles. I will also continue to limit fast food. Out of all the micronutrients, I was most shocked about copper. My intake was apparently 1025% (yes, you read that right) the recommended value. At first I thought that was impossible, but after researching possible sources I changed my mind. Some of these include nuts, soybeans, chickpeas, dried fruit, and tofu. All of these can be found on my three day record. I also found that the upper intake level (UL) is about 10 mg whereas mine was 9.12mg.
I definitely need to pay more attention to my copper intakes, especially since it can also have an indirectly proportionate effect on zinc, which happened to be quite low for me. In evaluating the remaining micronutrients, I was quite deficient. To help increase vitamins A, B6, Folate, and Vitamin KI could add spinach to my diet. For Vitamin B1 I could eat more sunflower seeds (unsalted!) or wheat bread. An option for increasing B3 is chicken and green beans. For Vitamins B12, D, and Pantothenic Acid dairy products such as eggs would be helpful. And lastly for Biotin, I could eat either carrots or almonds. In reference to the minerals, several of the foods already listed would be helpful. For Chromium broccoli and grape juice would increase levels. For a fluoride increase, eat strawberries or avocado. For Iodide, eat eggs or cheese. Spinach would help increase both Magnesium and Zinc.
For Molybdenum, I could add kidney beans or black beans to a salad. For Phosphorus, I could eat more almonds. And lastly, for Selenium I could add wheat bread or sunflower seeds to my diet. Thankfully, I was a little bit over the recommended values for Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Iron, and Manganese. Overall, I enjoyed this project, and it was a huge wake-up call for me. I did not realize that I am deficient in the majority of the vitamins and minerals. To help consistently fix this, I plan on taking a multivitamin that will help me to cover the vitamins and minerals. As far as my activity level, I feel like I am active, but I can always stand to exercise a little bit more, as long as my calories and energy levels are keeping up.

Eva Mccormick

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