Project Title: Fitness and Nutritional Cookbook
Essential Question(s):
- How does living a healthy lifestyle affect someone athletically, and additionally affect other aspects of their life?
- How does changing a diet strengthen the mind-muscle connection within one’s body?
- How would creating a resource (cookbook) for others help achieve goals of becoming fit?
- What does it take to achieve a healthy lifestyle?
Statement of Purpose
For my senior project, I will learn what it takes to live a healthy lifestyle from a fitness and nutritional standpoint and use my findings to create a cookbook and informational resource for other people like me to reach their fitness goals.
Overview:
For my Senior Project, I will spend my time participating in three completely different diets while living an extremely active lifestyle, seeing how each diet affects my body as a collective. I will be taking part in a Paleo, Mediterranean and Whole30 diet for two weeks each respectively and every day I will look at the changes and ways each diet makes my body feel. Food and nutrition is extremely underappreciated and is arguably one of the most important things about being fit and living a healthy lifestyle. I have been an athlete all my life and physical fitness is extremely important to me, but I have never really looked at it or tried to understand it from a nutritional standpoint. This project is extremely important because it will not only teach me how to be fit, but also give me the platform to teach others how to live a healthy life. The way I want to present my findings represents the mission of LREI education as my project will help me explore a topic I am passionate about in an out of the box and completely unique and creative way. I will share my findings in the style of a cookbook, where I will be picking 5-7 of my favorite meals from each diet, reviewing my experience with each diet, how it made me feel, how it reacted with my body, and recommendations I have for anyone who wants to try these diets.
How will you measure your success?
- Figure out the optimal diet and exercise routine for my goals as a person.
- Create a cookbook that will benefit me and help me get over my picky eating habits, but also help others get into eating healthy and enjoy good food.
- Learn what it takes to become involved in fitness and nutrition.
- Learn what it takes to make a cookbook and create a platform to share my knowledge.
My goal is to learn more about fitness and nutrition and be able to educate myself as well as others with my project. I also want to create a resource for others like me that is extremely helpful for eating healthily.
Resource List
Books:
Bigger Leaner Stronger by Michael Mathews
Food Resources:
Mediterranean diet: https://www.themediterraneandish.com/best-mediterranean-diet-recipes/
Whole30 diet: https://downshiftology.com/whole30-dinner-recipes/
High Protein / High Fat Weightlifting diet: https://www.muscleandstrength.com/articles/43-easy-high-protein-recipes
https://www.eatthis.com/protein-dinners/
Weightlifting and Fitness Resources:
Professional Fitness Influencers like Bradley Martyn and Scott Herman in addition to many others, to learn and study fitness from people who really know what they are talking about.
Fitness and Nutrition Documentaries:
Free Solo
Froning: The Fittest Man in History
American Weightlifting
Food Matters
Forks Over Knives
Supersize me
Daily Plan & Schedule
Schedule:
Book: Bigger Leaner Stronger by Michael Mathews
Week 1 and 2: April 12 – April 23 →
Diet: High Protein / High Fat Weightlifting Diet
Meet with a dietitian/nutritionist.
Week 3 and 4: April 26 – May 7 →
Diet: Mediterranean Diet
Talk with Coaches and fitness advocates about their fitness and nutrition.
Week 5 and 6: May 10 – May 21 →
Diet: Whole30 Diet
Talk with fit people in my life about their fitness and nutrition.
These are just the main structures of each section of my project, but on the athletic side, I will be weight lifting daily, going on a run every morning, playing basketball almost every day, and having basketball practice 3-4 times a week with games on the weekends. I will also be cooking new meals throughout the week and will be spending a lot of time preparing the food I am eating. Also, I will be having conversations with the fitness advocates and professionals I mentioned above and reading a book and watching documentaries. This will be followed with weekly blog/journal posts, documenting my project so I can remind myself how each week went, and actual work itself on design and construction of my cookbook. All this work will definitely meet the 30 hour a week requirement.
Documentation Plan
For the documentation part of my project, I want to create an informational cookbook. I want to make a cookbook from all the new foods that I ate throughout my project and make it into a cookbook for others to use. I would pick my favorite dishes but would also incorporate information for every dish on the standards that I use in my spreadsheet. How did this make me feel? How did this impact my performance? + many other categories. I will also have sections for each 2-week period and the diet I tried, describing my experience with the diet. I will look at how the diet impacted my muscle growth, keeping me full and energized and the effect it had on my body. I will describe how it affected my own body, and how it could impact others. I will measure certain standards at the beginning of each new diet and at the end, look at how the diet itself impacted my body and which diet was most effective. For example, recording my 2-mile time before and after and seeing how it has changed, or my bench press, or my squat. In addition, I would include my daily spreadsheets and notes from each diet in my cookbook to show what my day looked like and how I felt throughout the day. For example, my Mediteranean section of my book would be visualized something like this: The entire first section would be dedicated to my 5-7 favorite dishes I tried from my Mediterranean diet, including recipes and anything else needed. Then under each dish would be a small paragraph describing my experience with the dish, why I liked it, and recommendations for people who use my cookbook for themselves. Then for the second section of the Mediteranean portion of my cookbook I would want to write a detailed entry about my experience throughout this entire diet. It would focus on, as I said before, how this affected my body and recommendations I have for others who would think about trying this diet. Also including the improvements I have made athletically and how they compared to the other diets, like how much has my bench press increased compared to the Whole30 diet for example. Though only doing each diet for two weeks, I will keep things like water intake and sleep consistent to really be able to see the impacts my diet is playing on my body. I also would really want the second section to just be raw feedback. I want to actually include some of my own notes / journal entries / daily spreadsheet to show what my experience was really like on this diet. In addition, throughout my entire project, I will be interviewing / meeting with a dietitian and fitness experts and in the final section in the end of the cookbook I would highlight the lessons real fitness professionals have to offer and also share my own thoughts and ideas.
Material Needs
Note the material needs you are requesting from school (including work space & monetary needs) andthe needs you are filling outside of school, including materials you already own. These needs should be items that you have already discussed and have been approved.
Gym Membership
Books I will be reading
Food to cook / meal plan
Planner / journal to track my progress and fill out my daily logs.
Backup Plan
In all honesty, I don’t think my project would fall through as I’m very excited and passionate about this idea and I’m not very reliant on another person or an internship/job. But, if my project was no longer feasible, I would want to do a project surrounding the stock market and explore how and what it takes to be successful in the stock market.