JAMAL PRACHA
HEALTHY MEAL PLANNING
The purpose of this project was to make a day of healthy meals and one healthy snack. A healthy meal is a meal that has all of the five food groups in the right amounts prepared and eaten with the right tips. The five food groups are fruits, vegetables, protein, grains, and dairy.
The requirements of this project were to create a day’s worth of healthy meals with one healthy snack. The three meals were breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Each meal had to have all of the five food groups except breakfast. Each meal also had to have the right amount of grams from each group. First I had to figure out what healthy meals I would put on a planning sheet. I had to make multiple changes to this planning sheet before I could get it approved by Mrs. Curran. After that I put my meals on a poster. This poster had to be colored in a shading technique. It had to be neat, clean, and have good craftsmanship.
My first artifact is a planning sheet to figure out what my healthy meals would be. It has all the three main meals. There are many eraser marks on it signaling the multiple times it has been changed. These changes were to make sure all the amounts and all the foods were right and made sense. This planning sheet had to be approved by Mrs. Curran before I could move on. A concept I learned from this was how to convert cups to ounces from this project. So something that is ½ a cup filled with raw leafy greens is really ¼ a cup because of all the air in between the spaces of the raw leafy greens. If something is filled ½ a cup it does not mean it really weighs ½ a cup because the air is also being weighed.
I think I grew in persistence because I kept on making changes to the planning sheet when some of my meals did not make sense together or when I just didn’t have the right amount of food needed. I went back and revised about 4 to 5 times before I got my planning sheet approved by Mrs. Curran. You can tell because of all the eraser marks on my paper. I also think I grew in persistence because I changed my meals so that could be meals that people would actually want to eat. To me persistence means to keep on until you get it right, to not get discouraged, and to look for what mistakes you have made. It also means that after you have found those mistakes you try to fix them. You have to make your work easy to understand and easy to make sense of it. I kept on trying to improve to make my planning sheet better. I also had to look for solutions to fix my mistakes in my panning sheet. I did this by looking to see what I did wrong in my healthy meals. Then I changed the mistakes I made for example I changed the amount of dairy I had at lunch from 1 ½ cups to 1 cup. I did this because that would’ve made my total amount of dairy ½ a cup higher.
My second artifact is my notes sheet that tells me examples of the daily amounts of food groups needed and also examples of different types of foods in a specific food group. This notes sheet had tips on how to eat your foods. A concept I learned is that you should eat lean protein, fresh fruit, veggies rich in a variety of colors, and that half of your grains should be whole wheat. These tips tell you that these are best ways to eat your food. Another concept I learned about was the five food groups which are: protein, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and grains from this project. You need all of them in every meal except at breakfast because it is hard to eat vegetables at breakfast. The five food groups help you because your body benefits from each one of them in different ways. Another concept I learned is that every meal half of your plate should be fruits and vegetables and that they should be a variety of colors. This is because different colored foods have different nutrients. You need different nutrients because if you have too much of one nutrients you will start storing them as fat in your body which will in turn make you obese.
I think I really demonstrated my growth in creativity in the healthy meal planning project because I had to make up creative meals that people would want to eat and at the same time helping them become healthy. I had to put in different combinations to see if the meal was something anybody would eat. My meal also had to make sense so I couldn't have cereal at dinner and pasta at breakfast. To me creativity means to work to the best of your ability so that something is not mimicking something else and not a common thing or style. In this case I made my meals different from other people but not too extremely uncommon. I didn’t put fruit that would be hard to access but at the same time I didn’t put a fruit that is very common in other peoples’ meals.
By completing this project implies that I am capable of making and eating healthy meals that include all of the five food groups with the right amounts. It also implies that I know the serving sizes and nutrients that are essential in a healthy meal. This can help me later on in life because it can help me stay fit by making healthy meals and healthy choices.
I think the biggest challenge for me was to make sure that I had the right amount of grams for each food group in each meal. I overcame this challenge by going over my planning sheet and checking and adding my food amounts up to find out if I had passed the amount needed for each food group every day. I also overcame the challenge of making my meals make sense. So instead of having a meal of peanut butter with rice a more sensible meal would be pasta with tomato sauce.