Anna Gospodarek

April 25th, 2022

English 101, Tuesday-Thursday. 9:30 am

University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

We’re all familiar with the infamous “Freshman 15.” It’s tempting to ignore healthy food

when there is an equally delicious deep-fried thing right next to it. Eating well in school at

college is difficult, a lot more difficult than a person might think. “But with all of the dining

options at college there has to be someplace that has options for healthier eating” you think to

yourself. “ It has to be easy enough to get a well-balanced meal in whenmeal when you have all

of these options in front of you, right?” If only it were that simple. The fact of the matter is that

eating well at schoolcollege can be more challengedging than one might think. It’s tempting to

just ignore when a good thing is in front of you when there is an equally delicious deep-fried

thing right next to it. But wWe must learn to maintain some discipline, and make better food

choices. Which is exactly what I did. FThis is what I chose to focus my experiment on. For three

weeks I worked onate the daily recommended amount of fruits and vegetables (, according to the

USDA) , which is approximately 4 to 9 cups. I went straight down the middle and aimed to eat

around 4.5 and see if I could potentially move my way up, although that was not the main focus.

My main goal from this experiment was to see what kind of effects eating well would have on

my mental health. After all theall, the way to a healthy mind is through a healthy body!

I started my experiment by making sure I had a way to track my progressI began

preparing for my experiment by making sure that I had a way to track my progress and keep

myself accountable. I kept a log of every fruit and vegetable I ate through a app called “Food
Diary” and then I used a google spreadsheet to mark down all of the fruits and vegetables at the

end of the day while I kept a log of it all on an app called “ Food diary”. it all down at the end of

the day I was able to keep myself accountable and on the days that I didn’t meet the

recommended amount, I could either put a slash through it or make it up the next day. I tried to

keep it as simple as possible, additionally, I also tracked how my mood was impacted on a scale

from 1 to 5. Now I had everything set up and the last thing to do was to actually start the

experiment..What interested me the most about this experiment was how this would affect my

mental health. According to a study done on college students in 2017, just after two weeks of

eating the appropriate amount of fruits and veggies, students noticed a improvement in their

overall psychological well being and felt more motivated and invigorated. So in order to keep

track of my mental health and see how it was affected by my new adjustments to my diet, I

added a section on my google spreadsheet titled “mood” and rated it from a scale from one to

five, based on what I wrote down in my notes from that particular day. I had everything set up

and ready to go, now all that was left was to see if I was actually up to the challenge.

Most American adults aren’t meeting the requirements set by the USDA or by the CDC

concerning our consumption of fruits and vegetables. Only about 12.2% of Americans are eating

the standard 4.5 cups, and this is still below what we should be consuming. Throughout this

challenge, I was able to remain fairly consistent with the number of fruits that I ate. For a large

part of this experiment, I can owe that to having cuties on hand. I can also owe that to the

convenience of having premade salads just being a short walk across the street.Throughout these

past three weeks I was able to remain fairly consistent with the number of fruits and veggies that

I ate. However, towards the end of my experiment on week three, and taking in factors from
Easter weekend, I was consuming less than I had planned initially. However, I believe that the

results of the first two weeks are still largely compelling. By keeping track of my mood, it was

clear that on the days that I succeeded in eating the appropriate amount of fruits and vegetables

my mood was substantially better., just like the University of Otago had proved There are

obviously a few outliers, but this is what I was hoping would happen. . It’s pretty general

knowledge that eating well makes you feel better, but actually experiencing it in practice put it

into perspective for me. I would say that keeping up with eating your greens is absolutely

worthwhile and even worth the extra cash.by putting it into practice, and holding myself to the

challenge, it made me believe that there was much more to fruits and vegetables than the taste.

For my multimodal project, I decided to make a presentation, initially, I was going to

make a video but I know that my strengths lay in making presentations in person. But rather than

making a plain old PowerPoint, . I thought it would be fitting to make a powerpoint because I

think presentations are one of the most effective and most approachable ways to get a point

across. The visual element of powerpoints adds a new layer of understanding that you can’t get

from simply writing a paper, which is why I took extra care into finding a website that has

unique and interesting templates for presentations. I found a website that has many creative and

visually appealing templates that I could use to make my presentation. I personally find

PowerPoint to be very engaging and much more approachable, so I figured that it would be a

good starting point if nothing else. My target audience is college students, tThe title of my

presentationmultimodal project is “The quest for better eating in the college lifestyle” and I

thought that it was most fitting that my audience be college students like me. My main goal with

this presentation was to analyze my results. I go through what I ate, how I kept myself
accountable, and most importantly how it made me feel. This project could also be a good way to

motivate someone into making that change if they were already thinking about it. My main goal

with this presentation was to analyze my results. I go through what I ate, how I kept myself

accountable, and most importantly how it made me feel. It can also serve the purpose of being

entertaining since I found myself putting in images that I thought would be funny, and appealing

to pathos toand potentially make it more engaging for other people looking at it.

Overall this entire process ended up being a great learning opportunity for me. In the

grand scheme of things, iIt seems obvious that eating well would make a person feel better about

their own image of themselves, but I’m still a little surprised with the results myself, and

improve their mental health. It’s one of those things where you don’t believe it until you

experience it yourself. As I worked on the presentation and was wrapping up the actual

experiment I also found myself being a lot more invested than I initially expected. Sure, I always

put my all into my work, but I was having a lot of fun poking around on this new website

working on the presentation, and making sure it was something that I could be proud of. I think

bunkering down and working hard on things is always a good idea, but remembering to enjoy

yourself makes the entire process a lot easier, which is something that I can tell you, even

without having to test it. but it ended up being something that I needed to experience for myself

in order to understand the full benefits of it. I believe that this change in my diet will stick with

me, and I think that it has largely changed how I went about finishing this project. Rather than

focusing on my physical body, I decided to dedicate the project figuring out how it would benefit

my mental health. As Hippocrates said “ Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”
 Sources:

Conner, Tamlin S., et al. “Let Them Eat Fruit! the Effect of Fruit and Vegetable

Consumption on Psychological Well-Being in Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled

Trial.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, 3 Feb. 2017,

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0171206.

Ducharme, Jamie. “Fruits and Vegetables: 90% of Americans Don't Eat Enough.” Time,

Time, 17 Nov. 2017,

https://time.com/5029164/fruit-vegetable-diet/#:~:text=The%20most%20recent%20edition

%20of,cups%20of%20vegetables%20per%20day.