Anna Gospodarek

April 25th, 2022

English 101, Tuesday-Thursday. 9:30 am

University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

“The Journey to better eating”

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 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 when you have all of these options in front of

you, right?” The fact of the matter is that eating well at college can be more challenging than one

might think. We must learn to maintain some discipline, and make better food choices. This is

what I chose to focus my experiment on. For three weeks I ate the daily recommended amount of

fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA, which is approximately 4 to 9 cups. My main goal

from this experiment was to see what kind of effects eating well would have on my mental

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

I 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 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. 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 an

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 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 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. It’s general

knowledge that eating well makes you feel better, but 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. 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 PowerPoint 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. The title of my

multimodal 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. 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 to make it more engaging for other people looking at it.

Overall this entire process ended up being a learning opportunity for me. It seems

obvious that eating well would make a person feel better, and improve their mental health but it

ended up being something that I needed to experience for myself in order to understand its 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 to figure 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.