Week 9 Blog

In my life, I have always wondered how to gain weight because my BMI has always been on the lower side. Throughout highschool, my behavior was to eat everything in sight, consume as many calories as possible, and then maybe I could put on weight. I got into the habit of drinking three thousand calorie protein shakes in the morning coupled with breakfast and then 2 more meals throughout the day plus snacking in between. Now, I have completely changed my eating. I really only eat 2–3 meals a day with some light snacking in between and I feel like I am no longer overstuffing myself on a daily basis. In terms of environment, my environment right now is impacting my eating habits to the point where if I didn’t eat I wouldn’t really notice. I have to remind myself that I need to eat, and the best way to remember is that when I work out I get really hungry. I work out every day at 8pm, and the days that I forget I wind up not realizing I didn’t eat dinner until like midnight. As I get better at my scheduling of my own time I will eat better and workout more often and overall my environment will be more helpful to my overall health since I am living alone now and not at home. Genetics has never really seemed to come into play for my BMI. I really just look like my dad did when he was my age, everyone else in my family has like a nice mixture of the family genes. I have been able to predict what I will look like weight wise for my entire life assuming I eat right.

Body composition is a better indicator of health because BMI is really just an indicator for health risks and how you are doing health wise, but not really analyzing your body composition. Body composition is going to tell you what you should work on, if you need to workout more or eat more, or what you need to eat, or how the big 3 are affecting your over all healthy just by watching your body composition. I believe the big 3 main factors that are associated with obesity are behavior, environment, and genetics. The importance of both nutrition and exercise together is that you cannot have one without the other. If you just exercise and don’t change how you eat you will not affect your body composition much because you might not be able to burn enough calories to make a dent. If you eat right but don’t exercise at all it will have just about the same effect which is what drives people to just not eating so that they can just slim down by not consuming any calories at all.