The Importance of Nutrition

The importance of nutrition and its impact on wellness and well-being is discussed in this conversation. The speakers agree that people often rely on food labels to determine what they should eat, but wellness goes beyond just calories. They mention that wellness is about being in good health and being satisfied with one's looks, lifestyle, and responses to daily events. Nutrition is described as the science of food and its effects on health. The conversation also touches on eating disorders, the negative influence of social media on body image, and the consequences of dieting. The three components of wellness, physical, mental, and social health, are also mentioned. Overall, the conversation emphasizes the importance of listening to our bodies and fueling ourselves properly. Hi, my name is Anna Trace and I'm Georgie Condon. Today we're going to talk about the importance of nutrition or lack thereof. So when the topic of nutrition is brought up in a conversation, we often think of food labels and calories and how that affects us. However, the book Nutrition and Wellness for Life characterizes wellness in a different meaning. Referring to the food labels, I agree with this because I think people religiously are looking on these labels and relying on them to tell them what they should and should not eat. And this really does affect your life and your day-to-day routine. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that statement 100%. Going back to what I mentioned about the Nutrition and Wellness for Life book, this characterizes wellness to be the state of being in good health and it also ties into what the quality of life is. So Dorothy West makes a comment in her book and says that the quality of life refers to a person's satisfaction with his or her looks, lifestyle, and responses to daily events. However, this can be a good or a bad thing depending on which characterization she was talking about. Nutrition is the science of food and how it affects our health, wellness, and well-being. From the book Food and Nutrition for You, they state, well-being and wellness are sometimes thought to mean the same thing, but they don't mean the same thing. Wellness is the general state of being in good health, especially as an actively sought objective. Well-being includes wellness and also happiness, but also prosperity. In order to have that well-being and wellness, our body needs fuel and that fuel comes from food. So as we just mentioned about how food is the fuel for life, going back to what Dorothy West had to say about the quality of life, you know, there's good and bad things to what she had to say about how someone's satisfaction with his or her looks, lifestyle, and responses to daily events could be. One of them being looks, you know, we often overthink how we look in a mirror, leading to eating disorders and often a desire for weight loss, which then we would focus in on the dieting part of nutrition. So to dive into eating disorders a little bit, this book, Evaluation and Management of Eating Disorders by Christine Clark, Richard Parr, and William Castelli, dives into the deeper meaning behind eating disorders and states that there's an increasing number of people which are actually particularly teenage girls in which they starve themselves by choice and on the daily they view themselves in a mirror with feelings of fear and trepidation, dreading any sign of fat, which causes them to eat less and less on the daily to avoid those thoughts. But, however, due to physicians, health professionals, and researchers actively searching scientific disciplines for concepts, they are now able to find tools to help intervene successfully. There's a poem I'd like to share that Suzanne McAbee in 1983 had conducted. It follows. McAbee states, though we were both fat, you wore a bikini at the beach. While I rarely went, you went to parties to get drunk. While I talked softly with my own, you rarely smiled. While I prided myself in making you laugh, now you are thin, while I am not. Each morning you take a kaleidoscope of pills, a yellow appetite suppressant, a white thyroid pill, a blue water pill, two, three, four brown X-lacks, and now when you look great on a tennis court, you are too weak to play. I think McAbee does a great job illustrating this through words of how an eating disorder can affect someone mentally and physically and the downside of eating less and less to just be satisfied with how your body looks. I agree with this and I think people push themselves to the edge and lose as much weight as they possibly can and I think that people just need to stop focusing so much on dieting and focusing on loving their self and learning your body's needs and we need to listen to our bodies because that food is our fuel. We need to fuel ourselves when our body is telling us that we're hungry and it's okay to eat spontaneously throughout the day if that's what your body is telling you what to do. I 100% agree and I feel like as teenage girls and people in general, again, it's hard to not be cautious of what our body looks like when we're constantly compared to those online or people we see on a daily basis. However, having the mindset that food is our fuel and we need it to survive, this will allow people to understand that the less you eat actually does more harm than good. Yeah, it does really do more harm than good. It can mess up your hair, it can mess up your nails, it impacts energy levels, all sorts of health conditions are caused from girls not eating and I think I agree with the social media part because I feel like our generation looks to social media for inspiration which isn't realistic because they post only certain parts of their day and only certain parts of their life so we can't really see what they're eating and what they're doing to stay in a figure and it could just be the way their body is made. I feel like this really impacts young girls' eating habits because they only see these small clips of social media influencers' lives and so they change theirs to be just like theirs. Yeah, and adding on to that, social media influencers tend to use editing apps such as Facetune or Pixar to morph their bodies into something that they're not which causes a false reality to form in a young girl's mind which isn't healthy at all. And because of this, millions of Americans, children and adults, and even men and women are trying to lose weight but however, the consequences of dieting and weight loss have critical public health implications today. Yeah, so some of these effects from diets are messing with your short-term energy, fluctuating your body weight, having vitamin deficiencies, having element deficiencies, it's a long-term strain on your organs, it messes with your disease prevention, it affects your age and appearance and even your job performance. Yeah, and again, all of these go back to the topic of wellness and wellness is actually composed of three different things. It's your physical, mental and social health and these are all things that can affect your lifestyle. So, your physical health refers to the fitness of your body. It requires numerous body parts to work in harmony but there's a number of factors that can affect your physical health. For example, having a little bit of rest to reduce your energy, eating too much or too fast can upset your stomach and just lack of physical activity, poor sanitation and reckless actions can just keep your body from doing its proper work. Next is mental health. Mental health has to do with the way you feel about yourself, your life and the people around you and this can often be referred to as the general term for being stressed out, having anxiety and depressed and even emotionally exhausted. The typical signs in teenagers to have mental health problems are moody attitudes, withdrawals from social activities and friends, overactive and jumpy, acts or feels tired, worries about personal health problems, becomes aggressive with friends and family, loses concentration in class and does worse academically, has difficulty making decisions and feels like life is too hard. And then lastly is social health. And social health can be negatively affected when disagreements occur and problems arise but learning to resolve conflicts with others is an important skill that can help you achieve and maintain good social health. Yeah, and I think social health affects your overall well-being so when you don't have a good social life then you can't flourish in other areas of your life. And this affects your relationship with others around you and it can affect you getting a job later in life, job opportunities such as meetings or presentations so it really affects multiple parts of your life and your future. Yeah, like I know for me I've had multiple instances both in high school and middle school even and in college where my social health has been so bad to where I've been stressed and anxious about just getting up in front of people to go get food to the point where I just wouldn't get food and that would be terrible for my health because I'd be hungry the rest of the day and then I'd have that mindset that like, oh, it's okay to eat because I didn't want to get up in front of everyone. Yeah, and I think it also applies to when people are stressed, when you're stressed you kind of forget to eat sometimes if you have a really busy schedule or you even tend to overeat if you're stressed because you're worried about other issues you're not considering your diet and what you're putting into your body. In conclusion, I think a lot of our points hit on that nutrition affects our overall well-being and many factors contribute to how we feel in situations and how much food or how much food we don't put into our body. Yeah, I'm so glad that we reached our goal of informing those of the importance of wellness and the importance of nutrition or lack thereof. Thank you guys so much for listening. We hope this benefits you and your overall health.