Food and Activity Journal Reflection

There’s nothing like keeping a food and activity journal to shine a light on your bad habits.  I kept track of all of my eating and activities for 3 weeks and definitely found some room for improvement.  One thing I noticed right off the bat was that my food column was much, much longer than my activity column.  Though my meals were fairly well-rounded, my snacks left a lot to be desired.  Turns out I have a sweet tooth.  Among my list of snacks that I ate throughout the 3 weeks was:  cookies, mini chocolate biscotti, cinnamon rolls, mini butterfingers, brownies, etc.  On the healthier side, I did also snack on fresh cherries, low-fat string cheese, pistachio nuts, celery with sunflower butter, and raspberries.  By evaluating my food journal, I realized that can easily cut out some sugar and calories by stocking my fridge with more healthy snacks and fewer of the unhealthy ones.  I am fairly satisfied with the food section of my journal.

The section that troubled me the most was my activity journal, specifically the sleep section.  I noticed a small correlation between how much sleep I get and how much activity I do outside of my mandated work and school time.  Most nights I log an average of 6 hours of sleep, with maybe 7-8 hours during the weekend.  And in those 3 weeks I logged only 1 nap.  I was tired most days and it showed in my activity log.  An average day’s activity consisted of:  work/school, homework, cook/clean, watch tv, sleep.  Then I would be exhausted the next day as well.  So I set a goal of getting more sleep, with the hopes of getting 7-8 hours every night. 

Well, I didn’t fail completely but I didn’t improve my sleep schedule much.  One of the problems is that I have school 3 days a week and I work 8 hours on the other 2 days, which leaves me with just a few hours in the evening and the weekends to read, work on projects and papers, spend time with my friends and family, and have some unwind time (my guilty pleasure is tv).  In the 2 short weeks that I had to complete my goal I was too busy to do so. There were a couple of nights where I sacrificed some reading time (sorry Jean) in order to get more sleep.  But I just couldn’t get 8 or even 7 hours every night, at least not right now.  As we progress more into the summer and school work starts to peter out, I hope to increase my sleep and therefore my daily activities.    

I think having the students keep a food journal will help them see what it is their body goes through every day.  It’s easy to maintain unhealthy habits when we opt not to think about.  The food and activity journal forces us to look at our choices.  Then it is the teacher’s job to help students figure out how to evaluate them.  This is where teaching health and fitness comes in.  Having the students keep the journals doesn’t add too much to their homework, so it would be a time-effective tool for student self-evaluation.  Self-evaluation could be something as simple as looking for what they want to improve and setting a goal.  Writing could be incorporated by having students write reflection essays such as this one. 

If we wanted to include math and science, a fun exercise would be to make observations of the journal, create a hypothesis, and then test it.  An example I could use is my hypothesis that more sleep would lead to more activity.  I could make a graph showing how much sleep and how much active activity (ex. playing with my son at the park vs. watching tv) I do on a daily basis.  Then to test my hypothesis, I would continue to journal and graph my progress over the next couple of weeks with the set goal of sleeping more.  In the end, I would hope to have a graph showing an increase in sleep along with an increase in activity.  If sleep increased and activity didn’t, then my hypothesis would be false.  If sleep didn’t increase, then my results would be inconclusive.  A written report would allow students to continue working on their writing and grammar while analyzing their results or criticizing the correlation between their variables.  Creating graphs helps them with math, while their inquiry would exercise their scientific thinking.