Tag Archive for: dept-NRS

I chose a Saturday to track my eating. I have done projects like this in the past, and I always find it interesting because so much of what I eat has no label and contains many ingredients, making it difficult to track contents exactly. For example, on this day my roommates and I made a giant bowl of ceviche for dinner, with fresh speared yellow tail and about a dozen other ingredients. It was too difficult to track every ingredient as several people worked on it. This brings me to a concern I have: When we tell people to closely constrict certain food components, are we sometimes dissuading them from eating fresh whole foods? On the flip side, during this process I thought a lot about how hard it can be to avoid certain food components if you do eat packaged or prepared food. As a new years resolution this year I gave up processed sugar, honey, syrup, and any other incredibly sugar dense foods. I have not regretted it since, but it can make it so difficult to buy certain foods and to eat out. Even things like multigrain flakes and whole grain bread have a surprising amount of sugar in them. When I buy these foods, I have to sort through so many labels to find one that works for me, even at a place like Whole Foods. Added salt is just as ubiquitous, so I imagine It must be very hard for people to select food with that restriction, especially if they shop at a store that doesn’t strive for healthy options.

Breakfast:
Whole wheat bagel with cream cheese, sprouts, tomato, cucumber, and onion
Coffee with cream

Snack:
Smoothie- whole milk yogurt, blueberries, banana, 2% milk

Lunch:
Large Salad- many veggies, sunflower seeds, avocado
dressing- olive oil, garlic, vinegar, hemp seeds, salt and pepper, miso

Dinner:
Ceviche with chips, salad, and beans

Approximate salt for day (not including ceviche): 1,687 mg
Approximate fat for day (not including ceviche): 104.g g

I think it is easier for me to limit salt because we make most food from scratch in our house. I did pretty good on the salt score. I was pretty high for fat though. However, a decent chunk of that came from olive oil and avocado. All in all, I think the take home is that it is very difficult to keep track and restrictions can be very limiting.

I decided to take a look at my diet on a day where I hadn’t slept too much, didn’t have time to cook, and had to work a very busy night shift. While I know that I have been eating healthy other days – incorporating salads and healthy snacks like hummus and carrots – I knew this day would be pretty bad. I thought it would be a good day to pick because I sort of had to eat what was quickly available to me, plus the sleep deprivation didn’t help me make the healthiest of choice. Basically, doing this meal check, I saw that just the burger put me well over the Heart Healthy diet needs. The sodium alone put me well over how much I would need to consume on a heart healthy diet. You have to wonder, how some patients manage to make the adjustment, especially if they are leading very busy lives both at home and work. I’m not saying it is not possible, but I can see it being very hard to change habits of eating out if it is something they do 1-3 times per week. Essentially they would have to stop all together or switch to healthier dining out options that can include fruits or salads.

“Breakfast” – Almond butter and honey toast

Almond butter (1tbs): Na 72 mg, Fats 1 g

Whole wheat bread: Na 132 mg, Fats 0 g

Honey: Na 1mg, Fats 0g

Water – Na 0, Fats 0g

“Lunch” – Habit cheeseburger and fries with water

Cheeseburger: Na 1,770mg, 36g fat

Fries: Na 164mg; Fat 3g

“Dinner” – None

Snacks – none because I forgot them on the counter at home before work, so LOTS of water on my overnight.

Yesterday I spent the day entertaining some friends who were visiting for Labor Day weekend. A huge part of showing someone a good time in Santa Barbara, besides seeing the mission and the courthouse, is taking them to all the best restaurants and the local hipster ice cream shop and so on. I try to be conscious of my eating habits, for both health and financial reasons, but yesterday my single goal was to keep everyone happy– dieting took the backburner. For breakfast I ate my kale, pear, lime, ginger, celery smoothie that I try to make a habit. But once I met up with my friends we had tacos and ice cream downtown for lunch. The taco meat was definitely salty and fatty, and the ice cream was probably all the saturated fat I was supposed to eat all day. However, I don’t know the exact amounts of either; there was no food label or calorie counter in the taco stand. Eating at restaurants must be so difficult for Cardiac patients when they really don’t have a choice what type of food their loved ones are asking for. It seems like many people would end up being polite, and choose not to make a fuss and tell their children, “Actually my doctor told me I can’t eat this type of food.” Without knowing the content of the food the food you’re ordering, and often not being able to choose a restaurant with healthier options, eating out must be a source of stress and discouragement for many adults trying to limit their salt and fat intake. After dinner, another friend made us all steak and yams and cold slaw. When eating the yams, I mentioned “These are amazing, what did you put in them?” My friend replied, “Heavy cream and a big stick of butter.” I had thought the yams were the “healthy” part of the meal! Unless you are sitting at home, cooking for yourself, reading every label and measuring your daily allotment of fat and salt specifically, it seems impossible to really know what you’re eating. In one day of being social and polite, I ate salty, fatty red meat twice and washed it down with ice cream and butter mixed with yams– all without ever seeing a single food label or any nutritional information.

I had planned on tracking my food for today, September 8th, as I kept forgetting to take photos of my meals over the last few days and thought it would be nice to add some photos to the post. Then I started thinking about it and to get a realistic view of what I actually eat I decided to analyze what I ate yesterday. I try to be pretty conscious of what I eat and yesterday wasn’t necessarily a “bad” day but I was at home studying with not much food left in the fridge so I ended up snacking for lunch instead of prepping a healthier meal.

I plugged my meals into the USDA’s SuperTracker website to get a good analysis of my nutrient and calorie intake. Some foods were a little difficult to input, but I did my best to reconcile the nutritional information of what I ate with the options they had available on their site.

This is a summary of my meals from yesterday:

Breakfast: Quinoa sauteed red bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms topped with sheep’s milk feta and a boiled egg

Lunchtime Snacking: Seedless green grapes, carrots and white bean hummus, TJ’s flattened bananas, and TJ’s thai chile and lime cashews, TJ’s mango icecream bar… not the best lunch

Dinner: Rice noodles with broccoli, onion, and mushrooms in a garlic, ginger, soy sauce. Apfelshorle to drink (sparkling water and apple juice).

Looking at my daily food group targets I don’t think I did a bad job:

I went slightly over for my fruit intake but the majority was whole fruits. I also went over for my veggie intake which I think is great. I almost hit my protein target and was under on my grains target but feel I had plenty of fiber.

I was significantly under on my dairy but I thought I would have hit my calcium and B12 needs with other food groups. Unfortunately I was under the target in both of these nutrients. I usually snack on more cheese, eat meat a couple times a week, and have quite a bit of fortified almond milk so I hope this isn’t an issue. It would be interesting to track my intake over an extended period of time to see if I hit the targets.

Now for the heart healthy diet… I went over the limit on both saturated fat and sodium intake!

My overall fat intake wasn’t too bad. It made up 34% of my daily calories, largely in part to my large snack of cashews which I definitely don’t eat on a regular basis.

My saturated fat was a bit high (13% of my total calories). There is a lot of information that has recently circulated about cooking with olive oil at high heat so I’ve tried to start cooking more with coconut oil and ghee or butter. Researching more about different types of oils and how they are affected when used for cooking has been on my to do list for awhile. Regardless of their safety when heated, I should be conscious of the amount of oil I use when cooking.

I was also over on my sodium intake but thankfully not by too much. I typically don’t cook with a lot of soy sauce but I do use salt and love salty cheeses like feta. Despite this I did go on a long run yesterday and think I sweat out my fair share of sodium in the heat. I also try to stay away from processed foods and know that many are prepared with large amounts of sodium.

I think following a heart healthy diet or any kind of restrictive diet would be difficult. I love food and tend to let myself eat what I want as long as it is in moderation. However, I definitely can’t say I always moderate myself appropriately, especially when studying or writing a paper

Thankfully there are many tools available that can help an individual monitor how they eat and exercise and how it affects their health. I know a large part of keeping myself active involves setting goals and tracking my workouts. It can be very motivating when you’re able to track your progress and see improvement.

Hello, name is Vannessa Barretto. I have lived in Oxnard throughout my entire life, except for one year in 2010-2011, came back for school but not for long….

It was a difficult decision for me to head back into school after graduating with my ADN from Ventura College this past year 2014. I have been going to college ever since high school graduation without any real break the last 8 years (hah I could’ve gotten a doctorate already).

In 2010, I headed off to North Dakota being offered an athletic scholarship with collegiate softball. I took advantage of the scholarship and pushed my luck in nursing while being a full time student, employer,  and athlete traveling the U.S missing classes, didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. So came back home to save money and focus on school and my future career.

I had played softball for 15 years straight, to add year round and it was a huge change for me that took some time to get use to. I realized all things happen for a reason and I couldn’t have been more thankful for how it all played out.

Now since after graduating with my ADN, I have been working for Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura since last November working in the Medical-Surgical/Oncology Unit. The experience I gained from North Dakota doing a full year of nursing opened my mind set of what nursing can be, how the culture is so different even in the United States. As I gain more experience in the nursing field I plan to work in Public Health/Travel RN, possibly in a manager setting or work my way to a Nurse Practitioner in years to come. However with all this schooling taking longer than expected, I have been thinking of taking a break after our graduation this upcoming May. I would like to travel with partner in crime (whom you see in the picture below). Actually for the first time, I will be traveling outside of the country in a few months for a short period in time but as a glimpse of what is yet to come.

Look forward to all your posts/responses.

Ciao!..See you soon.