Food blog

Food blog and change…

Keeping the food journal for a week made me not only more aware of what I was eating, but more aware of what my whole family was eating.  We have never really gotten into a rhythm for cooking dinner since the summer classes started, and often for dinner we go to the supermarket and pick out individual servings of separate things from the deli or salad bar.  Not things that were hugely unhealthy, but still, each of us tended to get the same thing time after time, so we were missing variety.  We also weren’t eating many vegetables,  though we were getting lots of fruit.

The change that the food journal got me to make was to start planning the week’s dinners ahead of time.  This past weekend my husband, my daughter and I worked together to make the schedule for the week.  Part of the reason we had stopped doing this was that everyone likes very different things.  My daughter turned vegetarian a couple months ago, my husband could live on roasted chicken, and if I never ate chicken again in my life, that would be ok with me.  We made a plan that everyone could live with.

So how did it work out?  Sunday night we didn’t follow it.  We’d had a busy day, and dinnertime came and we were tired and hot, and picked up sushi at the supermarket.  But the rest of the week we did.  No one had the same thing any two nights.  We had green beans and salad and lots of gazpacho. We stuck to the plan, although we swapped a couple of the nights. 

To make the menu we made a calendar for the week, and everyone wrote on post-it notes what they wanted when.  With the post-its, things could get rearranged as made sense.  With the week’s schedule in mind, I bought groceries for several days at a time.  Like so many things, it makes complete and total sense, but takes time and planning by everyone.  I think we will continue it into fall as all of us will be even busier, and less able to commit to making a sensible dinner plan for everyone at 5pm each weeknight. 

I had hoped to make a fitness goal as well, but over the course of the past week, the vague pain I had in my ankle has turned into really painful Achilles tendonitis.  We’re off travelling for the next two weeks, and I’m just hoping it will get better on its own with only moderate use, but I’ll see when we get back.
What are the implications for teaching health?  I think the food journal is a huge tool for teaching nutrition  as well as science and math.  With my own daughter the subject of what she eats is a loaded one, and it would be fantastic if she had a school project to keep a food journal for a couple and then  analyse the nutritional content, all in the spirit of a school science project (instead of mom nagging).  The record keeping is an example of scientific record keeping, and the analysis uses both math and science. 
My daughter's school did urge, but not require, kids to keep an exercise journal for PE.  Kids who turned one in each month got an extra hour of recess one day.  I know it appealed to some, but my daughter never did one.  I think it could work as part of a class goal of paying "taking care of ourselves" during a unit on health and nutrition.  The PE program might have been too anonymous.
My daughter's school also had a "marathon" each May, where kids did laps around the field each day until they had accumulated 26.2 miles worth.  A bunch of teachers also participated, and the kids loved it.  There was a lot of school excitement about the marathon, and the teachers' participation certainly contributed to that.