Science of Food (portions)

My intention for 2013 is to lose 70 lbs.  What does this have to do with homeschool science?  Well, I figured if I was going to be researching calorie information, I might as well turn it into a unit on food, nutrition, calories . . . you get the idea.

The first thing that I need to do is find out the latest replacement for the food pyramid.  The government still has a type of pyramid but they prefer the “my plate”.  I went here to find out more.

I found this worksheet for 1600 calories a day, which as it turns out, is the number of calories 4 out of 6 in the house should be eating.

What is a whole grain?  This worksheet is just what I needed!  I went to the pantry with the kids and we looked at all of our whole grains–it was a limited selection.  In November I decided that I would not be buying granola bars, “snack” crackers, or any processed “food”.  I do buy pretzels.  I have not bought any cookies either.  So our whole grains were on the nutritious side.  I do have cereal–Life and a wide variety of gluten free Chex cereals.

To help my plan a few meals I found this sample week for 2000 calorie diet.

This is an awesome chart on amounts of food and calories.

This site even had an online meal planner, I thought that was pretty cool as well.

All those resources are really great BUT putting them into use was hard–we cut, measured food trying to figure out a serving size.  The project stopped at this point.  We still need to assign calories to the food (I’m interested to see what those numbers are) and make up meals to fit all of our “pyramid items.”

one cut of banana

1/2 cup of grapes

1 cup of apple, 1 cup of blueberries, 1/2 cup of orange, banana, grapes, strawberries

our “normal” veggies 1 cup of broccoli is 4 “heads” 1/2 is 5 tiny peppers, 3 asparagus

this is one cup of cooked brown rice and one cup of pasta

one serving of milk is 1 cup of milk=1 slice of cheese=1 yogurt

A 1600 calorie diet is:

5 oz of grain

2 cups veggies

1 1/2 cups fruits

3 cups of Dairy

5 oz of protein

I thought this project would take a few days but as we work through our “plates” at each meal and log our food and exercise . . . maybe we aren’t doing as well as we thought we were . . .

How does your family tackle food issues?  I’d love to know how other moms make it work.

Be Blessed.

Hip Homeschool Moms, TGIF,