In Fall 2018, I took Fitness Concepts Through Exercise to fulfill Goal 11.
PHED 101 introduced me to the importance of physical activity and health on not only a daily basis, but for life. This was accomplished by learning simple yet challenging exercises for all parts of the body. Also, the consequences of how personal actions can effect my health was explored as well. The intent for this class is to help college students realize these key concepts before it is detrimental or too late. From my observations, college students tend to have unhealthy habits such as eating excessive junk food and being sedentary. Since we are so young and in such a pivotal part of our emerging adulthood, it is important for students to learn how to implement health-conscious actions into their daily lives to not only improve health now, but in the long run. PHED 101 helps to create mindfulness towards health, which is incredibly important for real life.
I chose to make the Mindless Eating Mini Research project my artifact for this class. The assignment was to create our own small research project on mindless eating after watching videos of Brian Wansink’s research on mindless eating at Cornell. The mini project I conducted was trying to determine if eating in a more social environment encourages overeating. As a college student, I share meals with groups of friends all of the time. So, I was trying to study if social eating increases. I found the results to be inconclusive because so many factors go into how much food a person eats and there was a lot of variability in my study (age, sex, meal times, foods, etc). However, this experiment would be a great segway into a more controlled experiment in the future.