Collegiate Fitness

It is important for my school to have a gym and rec center for easy exercise areas, a pool would be preferred. It is also obviously important for my school to have doctor or some other kind of health services.

Cal Poly has a health clinic on an appointment basis. It has on site x-ray machines and prescription medications, as well as four certified physicians, four licensed physician assistants, five nurse practitioners and a host of registered nurses, providing year round care. The rec center, right next to the health clinic, located in the lower center of campus, features an 8 lane 50 meter pool, a workout room, and many available fitness and instructional classes.

Cal Poly has club sports including, all major sports except for football, and includes other club sports such as fencing and cycling.

I would be interested in participating in swimming and fencing, and possible cycling. Sign up is through and online form.

Food Inc Response

I thought it was surprising how much politics play a role in the food we eat. It was shocking that junk food or fast food is purposefully made less expensive than healthy food, so people with very low incomes are forced to eat junk food because they can but more of that than healthy food for the same price. I had always thought that I ate fairly healthy but now I look at that with some scrutiny, I think I have been somewhat influenced by the big companies into buying what they want me to buy. One question I had was why was corn chosen to be the big subsidized crop of the U.S., why not some other thing? Was there a reason or did is just sort of fall that way?

The Farm

At the farm one of the neat things I learned was that cauliflower is actually the flower of the plant, as is broccoli, but cauliflower grows in a womb of leaves whereas broccoli just buds off like normal flowers on other plants would. I tried to make the kale chips but I used too much oil and ended up burning them, so they really just tasted like burnt paper. But I also steamed the broccoli to go along with my dinner and it was delicious. I also made a really good salad with the lettuce, spinach, some radish, and a bit of arugula to give it some spice, it was very good, and also very filling. I have found that these vegetables fill you up a lot more than store bought vegetables.

Fitness Test Results

After taking the first fitness tests of the endersession, I want to improve my mile time. 8:00 is a pretty good time but I think I can get it down to at least 7:30. I was able to preform 27 pushups in one minute, my goal is to up that to at least 40 by the end of endersession. I would also like to be able to get through 4 minutes of plank position. I think the running during endersession will help me to improve my times, also biking to school and internship everyday will help me with my running times. As for push ups and plank, I plan to go back on the 100 push ups program which I have done before, and it has greatly improve my upper body and core strength. This will help to improve both my push up numbers and plank times.

The Food Pyramid and Fats

What did you learn about the food pyramid? fats?

That the common conception about all fats being bad is wrong. There are good fats, HDL, that should be high in your body and bad fats, LDL and Triglycerol, that need to be kept lower. Also that the traditional food pyramid is not a real nutritional guideline, but a piece of propaganda heavily influenced by lobbyists and big corporations. It is also very vague in everything it recommends including terms such as, limit intake to as low as possible instead of hard numbers or percents.

Did anything surprise you?

That Crete, the country with the highest fat intake has the lowest number of people afflicted with heart diseases. It seems that they are using lots of good fats instead of in America where a lot of the fats people eat are the bad fats. It was also surprising about how much Americans have cut down on their fat intake and how sadly lots of that was the good fats, so now while Americans are eating less fat they are mostly just eating the bad fats.

What types of fat do you mostly eat? What can you change in your diet to incorporate healthier foods?

I am not sure what fats I mostly eat, whenever possible I try to use good oils like olive oil instead of vegetable oil. I think something to improve would be to look at the labels on food to check whether they have bad fats in them. I didn't used to know which fats were bad, I always got confused but now that I know I can stay away from saturated fats and gravitate more towards unsaturated fats.

Health Living

Health to me means eating right and getting regular exercise, it also means being in a state where you are happy and satisfied with yourself. I chose the six words, exercise, active/physically fit, happiness, friends, diet, and sleep as my key words of being healthy. Being both physically and mentally healthy is important and all of those words are key to both. Friends and happiness provide motivation to be active and keep you in a good mental state. Sleep allows you to function happily and well during the day, so getting enough of it is critical. A goal I have for myself is to set up a workout routine that I can use regularly to get and stay in shape. I want to gain some more muscle and fill myself out a bit.