20 Time: Trying to Be Healthy for a Month

In the past month I've learned that it is incredibly difficult to suddenly start eating healthy. When I'm stressed (especially during AP testing weeks), I constantly find myself reaching for a bag of hot cheetos or walking towards the cafeteria to buy some cinnamon buns during tutorial. This was a pretty big setback during the first week and a half of this month, so I started bringing a box of cut fruit to school so that I would always have something healthy to munch on for when I got hungry. This proved to be an extremely successful tactic to make sure my snacks are healthy too because I rarely found the need to buy food from the cafeteria or eat hot cheetos when I had fruits in my backpack or on the table next to me. I've learned that I have a pretty hard time eating healthy when I'm stressed and often skip meals because I don't get hungry or just forget to eat. This project has forced me to be more conscious of what I eat and kept my meals regular and in check.

The next steps for my project will be to compare my recordings about my mood and sleepiness from the two months and compare how my blood pressure and possibly my BMI were affected by my month of eating healthy. The bariatric doctor I have been talking to mentioned that it may be difficult to find solid evidence of a change in these readings, however, because the diet change was only for a month. Typically, she said, it takes around 3-4 months to see actual results. I never considered myself to be a binge-snacker, but after this project I think it's safe to say that binge-snacking is a huge problem, especially for people with anxiety and people who are stressed out. I think a lesson I learned that other people can apply to their lives is how to conquer binge snacking: always keep a healthy alternate snack option nearby so that when you get hungry, you will eat that instead of searching the kitchen for junk food.

The table I used to keep track of the foods I ate during meals is below: