My Food Pyramid Results!

For the last week I have been keeping track of how many fruits and veggies I eat during the day. I wanted to see if I was meeting the recommendations of the MyPyramid site. I tried really hard to not change my eating habits this week, because I wanted to find out how I was doing on my own.

Here's a fun little graph a created to show visually how I did. 

Purple represents the fruit recommendation of 2 cups/day. 

Green represents the veggie recommendation of 2.5 cups/day. 

The peaches are how many fruits I actually ate, and the carrots are how many veggies I actually ate.

I love how this gives a visual of what my eating habits were over the week. 

Can you guess which day Matt and I went grocery shopping? Sunday

Can you guess which days I was at school all day and packed my own foods? Monday and Tuesday

Can you guess which days I ate at least one meal out (a whole other issue of it's own)? Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

So the verdict is clear I think. I NEED to eat more veggies. And, I need to work harder to eat we rounded all week long, not just the days that I spend all day on campus. Oh, and I obviously favor fruit over veggies.

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Now, for the next week I am going to track how I do trying to even out the recommendations with my actual intake, and find more of a balance between fruits and veggies.

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Did you know the fruit and veggie recommendations are now measured in cups/day, not "servings?" Did you know that recommended amounts vary based on your age, sex, activity level, and weight goals? To find out your recommended amounts, check out the MyPyramid site for yourself!

Examining MY "food pyramid"

As and MPH student, I spend every day learning about, talking about, and thinking about health. Recently I was using MyPyramid.gov for a work project, to look up the general fruit and vegetable intake recommendations.

Now we've all heard that Americans aren't eating enough fruits and vegetables. In 2005 about 33% of U.S. adults ate fruit two or more times per day, and about 28% ate vegetables three or more times per day.

I am not doubting that we need to eat more fruits and veggies as a country, I mean look at those around you. Very few people have a circle of family and friends in which EVERYONE eats and ideal diet. On the  other hand, I wonder how accurate these statistics are. Especially because there is so much confusion about how many servings of fruits and veggies you should be getting, and what a serving actually is.

As a student of health behavior and health education I am fairly well informed about healthy eating, but I am no expert. I don't have have a background in nutrition or dietetics. While my professional interests separate me from the general population, I was curious how well rounded my own diet is. I try to ensure fruits and veggies in my diet every day, but lately I have been noticing that I eat more fruits than veggies.

So I decided to look at my typical intakes, and see how they compare to the guidelines set forth by MyPyramid.gov. I am using MyPyramid because it is often used to teach students in school, and is known as the simple "go to" source for basic nutrition guidelines.

There is a feature on the MyPyramid site to enter your age, sex, height, weight, and activity level. A personalized recommendation list is then generated based on your current weight, or for losing weight if you are above the "healthy range" for your height and sex. Here are my recommendations based on my current weight.

Some time next week I will post how I measured up for the days that I tracked. I am going to work hard to not do anything different because of this, but to instead just stick to meals that have been typical to me recently.

Stay tuned for the results...I can't wait to find out myself!

I am terrible at blogging...

...let's see if I can change that, because it's a nice way to get thoughts out sometimes.