Personal Narrative: A Healthy Diet

Last summer I worked as intern at the City of Minneapolis. Some memories I have from this experience include eating authentic tacos from the food trucks in the scorching sun. Standing in long queue for the greasy bacon burger and lunch social gatherings over chinese food to name a few. I ate like never before that by the end of the summer all the mouth watering food had converted into 10 pounds of unwanted weight. The hopes of eating healthier and making better choices vanished like empty calories.
The beginning of a new school year was the perfect time to make goals and see them through. To reach my long term goal of healthy eating and living, I set some shorter term ones which included eating out less, cooking more, and quit drinking beer. …show more content…
Eating this much carbs is definitely not something new in my diet, in fact carbohydrates is one of major food group that I know I eat more than my fair share of. I am Nigerian and in my culture, we have food that we call swallow food. These type of food are made of yam flour, cassava flour, and so on. They are also very starchy food and are great source of carbohydrates. We usually eat this type of meal for dinner and just a fist sized is very filling. Growing up, I ate lots of carbohydrates like swallow food, rice, yams, breads, and potatoes. Making the realization that carbohydrates have always being a major portion of my meal, I decided to explore ways to cut down on carbohydrates or consume better carbohydrates. The text introduced the Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH), in the chapter about Cardiovascular diseases. This dietary approach consist of vegetables, fruits, low-fat dairy and whole grains food to help decrease risk for lots of cardiovascular diseases. Examining the DASH plan, I noticed that I have already incorporated more vegetables, fruits and low-fat dairy to my diet. However, the whole grain food is the category that was missing from my diet. The DASH plan recommended inclusion of healthy whole grains such as whole wheat bread and brown rice for a healthy diet plan. Using the DASH plan as inspiration, I substituted my white rice with brown rice, refined pasta with wheat pasta, refined sugar with brown sugar. I also made the executive decision to stop eating bread and swallow food. The new taste of whole wheat definitely took some getting used to. However, what proved tougher was staying away from bread and swallow food. Being at Saint Olaf I was able to resist bread and swallow food because they weren’t around. However, going back home during breaks was hard. I noticed that no matter how healthy