Healthy Eating Assignment
For the healthy Eating Assignment you are going to choose 1 of the 4 rules and do a little action research.
Option 1: Eat Real Food
Can you go for one day eating only real food. Nothing from a package, nothing that has any extra preservatives. Sounds easy? Great. Download the Real Food Diary template and track one full day of eating nothing but real food.
This is a two part challenge.
The first challenge is simply being able to record everything you eat. Recording what you eat sounds easy, but you may be surprised at how difficult it can be. If you are on the go, grabbing a quick snack etc...it can be very difficult to keep an accurate record.
If you have a mobile device just jotting down a memo to yourself can help, or pack a little pad and pen or pencil with your for the day to jot down what you eat.
The second part of the challenge is selecting just real food options. What do you have for breakfast? Is that cereal real food? Dinner? Those chicken fingers from the package aren't classified as real food because of the ingredients list. Remember to keep it simple.
Option #2 Track your Free Sugar Intake
We are surrounded by sugar and part of learning to limit how much sugar you injest is understanding how much we eat in a day.
This option is simply to track how much free sugar you eat. The recommendation is to eat less than 5% of your total calories as free sugar, but that can be a difficult calculation to make, so we will use an average and say the 5% is about 7 grams of free sugar.
You need to look at the ingredients list on food and check out the amount of free sugar you are eating. (Remember free sugars are those that are added to food, not the naturally occuring sugars in real food).
Record your free sugar intake in the sugar tracker template.
Option #3 Water Tracking
Again, you can drink other fluids besides water and your body will absorb them, but I'll recommend water as it great at hydrating the body without adding unnecessary additives.
Track how much water you drink in a day. While there is no set guideline for water, a popular idea is 8 X 8 (Eight 8 ounce glasses of water). It's popular because it is easy to remember. You don't have to follow that, but track your water intake.
What you wll do is to judge your hydration level by the colour of your urine. This can really help you judge how hydrated you are and is definitely based on your own physiology.
Use the Water Tracking Template to track your water intake for the day and reflect upon your state of hydration.