Nutrition: Nutrition and Physical Activity Essay

Submitted By kayleet26
Words: 1003
Pages: 5

Evaluation

The daily recommended intake for each person is uniquely designed for their body qualifications, taking into consideration many factors in order to design a series of goals for the overall benefit of the human being. I always believed that my daily intake was relatively well oriented to my body’s needs but to my surprise quite a few of the divisions had a great disparity as to what is considered health for my unique body structure and physical activity.

Total Calories The 2,996 Kilocalories shown on my DRI definitely surprised me because I always thought that in taking that many calories in one day would be unhealthy. When I analyzed it, I realized that it probably had a lot to do with the amount of physical activity I do on a daily basis. I go to a gym based on CrossFit in which they push our physical limits in ways I never thought possible. The way it works is, we usually run 400 meters as a warm-up, then we stretch our muscles, and lastly we begin the workout, which is written out by one of the coaches. An example of a workout could be yesterdays, which consisted of a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, followed by another mile run. The workouts aren’t always as physically exhausting as this one; there are days when we focus on weightlifting or even stretching.
Before reading my DRI, I would’ve thought that I needed to lower the amount of calories I ate daily but now I learned that I need to actually increase the amount of calories I intake daily, it just has to be the good calories.

Macronutrients As far as macronutrients go, I can use some improvements. Out of the 3 categories featured in the averaged days, fat was the only one in which I fell into the numbers on my DRI. My intake of carbs was only about 50% of what it should have been and therefore can definitely be improved. Finally, the amount of protein I averaged in the 3 days, fell a little short of the beginning of my DRI spectrum. Although, I didn’t have any alcohol during the averaged days, I rarely have a beer or a drink although now I see that alcohol would just increase empty calories that are also not good for me.

Micronutrients Since there is plenty of vitamins and minerals to be considered in this category, I think it’s safe to say that I should even out my intake since there is a couple of vitamins that I exceed in DRI and others that could use some work. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the reason my intake of Vitamin C is so high has something to do with my obsession with orange juice in the morning. Some people feel like they need coffee to get their day started, I feel the same way about my orange juice. Vitamin A (IU) and Riboflavin were also on target or overachieved. On the other hand, Vitamin E, Vitamin D, and Vitamin A (RAE), show a large discrepancy between my intake and my recommended intake.

Changes to be made
When I graduated high school and started college, my eating habits were terrible. I had a part time job about 4 times a week after school and eating McDonalds, Burger King, or Taco Bell came way to easy as apposed to cooking food for myself. Once I started CrossFit though, I came to the realization that spending a lot of money on the gym wouldn’t be worth it if I were going to eat unhealthily and undo all the hard work and physical activity. I began eating salads for the first time in my life and cut out fried foods, a lot of soda, white bread, etc. If I would’ve made these charts back then, they would’ve been embarrassingly worse and I realize that I’ve come