Healthy Lifestyle 3/15/2021

Monday, March 15th, 2021 - Public Speaking Period 9

By Ilya Avros and Zhixing Chen

Healthy Lifestyle Tech Talks

Kelly Lin

            Kelly's presentation focuses on sustainable diets, encouraging the audience to work towards a more sustainable diet to benefit their own health and the environment. To do this, she suggests we cut down our red meat intake since red meat can be damaging to our body and the environment alike. In a 12-year study by the American Heart Association in 2014, older men who ate more than 75g per day of processed red meat had a 28% higher risk of heart failure compared to men who ate less than 25g. Furthermore, those who ate the most processed red meat had more than a 2-fold increase in heart failure. Additionally, she discusses the parts of a healthy eating plate through an infographic to help the audience better understand the main concept of cutting down meat intake. Meat lovers cant really adapt to a small portion of meat. Kelly recommends us to choose healthy proteins like fish, poultry, beans, and nuts, and limit red meat. She highlights that a healthful plant-based diet emphasizes consumption of only healthy plant foods, such as whole grains, fruits, veggies, nuts, legumes, and healthy oil, while reducing intake of less healthy plant foods (pasta, white rice, and processed breads and cereals) as well as animal foods. Kelly explains a variety of plant diet alternatives such as vegetarian and vegan that can reduce risks of obesity, diabetes, heart failure, and unhealthy blood pressure. Finally, Kelly concludes with sustainable diet tips: grow something, shop locally, eat seasonally, tap your tap, retool your grocery list, and quality over quantity.

Jacob Gurevich

Jacob’s presentation was about the importance of daily exercise, and the fact that it’s achievable even without proper gym equipment. He started his presentation with a question to the audience on how the pandemic and closed gyms has affected their workout schedules. Throughout the class there was about a 50/50 split. He went on to talk about the impact of closed gyms on the population, and specified that cities faced the greatest impact on daily exercise. This was elaborated on with a study that showed that as a replacement for the gym, working out at home has proven to be similarly effective. Daily exercise at home reduces muscle stress, improved blood pressure, more energy, and better social capabilities. These benefits are easily achievable even without the machines regular gyms would provide. Doing bodyweight exercises like push ups that target muscles accomplish the same thing a machine at a gym would. In order to further his point, he provides a list of exercises shown below. He closes off his presentation by asking the audience to be creative in their approach, as well as to not use the inability to go to a gym as an excuse.

Gabriel Fanshteyn

Gabe suggests everyone limit screen time at night as it can negatively affect their sleep. He starts with a poll asking who keeps their phone next to their bed when they sleep with an overwhelming majority saying they do. Sleep is an essential function of life yet adolescents and adults are not consistently reaching the suggested amount. Teens spend almost all day every day on technology, which affects us negatively when we sleep. Using cellphones at night can negatively affect our sleep as it emits blue light, making it harder to fall asleep. In the end, Gabe suggests solutions of switching off the phone 30 minutes to an hour before going to sleep, reading a book in lieu of using your phone, or simply turning on the blue light filter mode.

Phillip Dulas

            Phillip’s presentation was about the importance of sleep in regards to one’s overall health. He starts his presentation with the fact that generally after a harder day with more mental fortitude, we tend to sleep longer. To better explain this, as well as the four stages of sleep, he provides an infographic shown below. Sleeping after these hard days, especially when it’s a long day of learning, is like hitting a ‘save button.’ Getting good sleep is important on these days in order to better retain the memories you need. Better sleep also improves the Natural Killer Cell count in the body, which essentially targets things like tumors and disease in the immune system. Along with this, sleeping better prevents several types of cancer, depression, and anxiety. In order to achieve this, Phillip provides us with several tips. He starts with the idea of treating sleep like medicine, and making sure that you aren’t ‘making up’ or missing out on sleep. It’s important to stay consistent with your schedule and keep your room at a cooler temperature. Lastly, don’t force yourself to sleep if you aren’t sleepy. Doing so draws connections between being awake and your bed, which is the opposite of what you want.

Nathan Selwa

Nathan advises us to try intermittent fasting as it can improve our overall well-being. The benefits of intermittent fasting include losing weight, reducing insulin resistance, reducing cholesterol and triglyceride buildup. Intermittent fasting is a meal schedule, not a diet, focused on changing when you eat, and what you eat. It is flexible and there are multiple ways to do it: 16/8 method (the main one; 16 hours fasting and 8 hours eating period where you are allowed to eat), eat-stop-eat method, 5:2 method. More importantly, Nathan emphasizes that this will not magically make you lose weight, and it must be paired with exercise to be fully effective. Nathan cohesively explains the idea of intermittent fasting while connecting it to his personal journey and how he has found great success with this method. A study done in rats showed 33-37% improved life span, which might be applicable to humans. Concluding his talk, Nathan gives the three big tips of cutting out refined sugars and carbs, snacking to a bare minimum, and prepping meals ahead of time. Overall, we should give the fasting a try but still focus on what we are most comfortable with.

Ian Yoon

            Ian’s presentation started out with the importance of stretching in daily life. Stretching regularly relieves back pain and improves posture, as well as developing a greater range of motion. Additionally, stretching before and after exercise is vital for preventing injuries in target groups such as triceps. To help the audience better understand what stretches to do, he provides a short list of stretches as well as diagrams on how to do them. Ian then goes on about the importance of cardiovascular activity in daily life. He cites the benefits like lower blood pressure, more stamina, and overall fewer health risks. He then provides ways to implement this kind of exercise no matter what our situation may be. For those of us able to go out, walking, running, and biking are great options we can do regularly. For those of us stuck inside, high knees, squats, jumping jacks, and burpees are an excellent alternative. 

Reflections 

Ilya Avros

            The presentations on March 15th were generally focused on 3 main topics: diet, exercise, and sleep. To kick the day off, Kelly started presenting about the idea of a sustainable diet. She outlines the benefits of finding balance in what you eat, ranging from improved health to environmental impacts. There was a lot of information packed into her speech, and overall towards the end I felt significantly more informed about what my diet should consist of. Later on in the day, Nathan also presented on dieting, more specifically intermediate fasting. Although his presentation didn’t necessarily apply to me, being in one of the target groups he recommended not to do that diet, I still felt like there were some good takeaways. For instance, the idea that dieting doesn’t work without exercise is something I can personally learn from. I don’t work out too often, given that bodyweight exercises aren’t very effective when there isn’t a lot of body weight. However, taking from Jacob’s presentation on exercise, I should be more creative with the ways I choose to go about things because home workouts are just as viable of an option. I learned that I don’t always need a machine to help me build muscle and convert my personal diet into progress, and I should instead find new ways to focus target muscle groups in order to better see progress. At the same time, taking from Ian’s presentation, I need to remember to stretch and focus cardiovascular activity. I personally neglect both of those things when I do actually find the time to exercise, and his presentation outlined the negative effects that practice has on my body. I suffer from bad posture and back pain for multiple reasons, so I should take the time to stretch daily in order to effectively combat those things. Additionally, I should consider going for runs or biking in order to improve my stamina, and reduce risk of heart disease. Lastly, Phillip and Gabriel both presented about the importance of good sleep, as well as methods of achieving it. Phillip mainly focused on the benefits of sleeping better, as well as the roots of what causes ‘good sleep.’ He outlined the idea that better sleep leads to better memory retention, especially after a long day of work. Additionally, I found the idea of not forcing yourself to be especially interesting. When I have trouble sleeping on time, I generally try to force myself and it never really works out. Knowing that trying to do that causes more problems than solutions is something I need to keep in mind more, because it’s definitely going to change my approach to sleepless nights. Gabriel’s presentation mainly focused on the effects technology has on your sleep, which is another area I could definitely take some key notes away from. Throughout quarantine especially, I’ve been spending most of my time socializing and doing work on my computer, which essentially means I’m online from dusk till dawn. I was moderately aware of the negative effects this has, especially with blue light coming from my monitors. Finding time to take a break from technology before bed is something I personally need to work on in order to hopefully also improve my sleep patterns.

Zhixing Chen

            Today’s blog focused on healthy lifestyles tech talks where students in class persuaded others of something anyone can implement to achieve a healthier lifestyle. Our blog reviewed each speaker on March 15th and included the main ideas and talking points from their talks, as well as how they were able to persuade. Ilya and I split the work by alternating the blogger between each speaker so that we would have time to fully write out each review in more detail.

We began the class with Kelly’s speech where she focused on sustainable diets, encouraging the audience to work towards a more sustainable diet to benefit their own health and the environment. Throughout her speech, she incorporates a lot of statistics and explains them in great detail. While she does get into multiple nuances of the topic, I feel that she went a little too much, as indicated by the long time her speech lasted. Nonetheless, it was a great speech about the detriments of consuming red meat and other diet alternatives. Speaking of alternatives, Nathan later advises us to try intermittent fasting, a meal schedule focused on changing when we eat and not what we eat, what as it can improve our overall well-being. The important thing to note is that intermittent fasting is not a diet, but a meal schedule. What I like most about Nathan’s speech was his connection to his personal journey and how he has found great success with this method. Concluding his talk, Nathan gives the three big tips of cutting out refined sugars and carbs, snacking to a bare minimum, and prepping meals ahead of time. Furthermore, we should give the fasting a try but still focus on what we are most comfortable with. In between Kelly and Nathan was Gabe’s speech on sleep and screentime, a little segue from food. Sleep is an essential function of life, but unfortunately, screen time can negatively affect sleep and people are not getting the suggested amount of sleep each night. Gabe suggests solutions of switching off the phone 30 minutes to an hour before going to sleep, reading a book in lieu of using your phone, or simply turning on the blue light filter mode.

Overall, this blog was insightful as it served as a platform for us to record and review each speech more thoroughly than the google forms and help the bloggers understand each speech more in-depth. We learned a lot about diets, nutrition, and sleep, further building onto the talks from the previous days. I think the way Ilya and I split the work was efficient and allowed us to have more information on each speech than if we would have both written for each speaker. In the future, I do not think I would have done anything differently, and this experience has prepared me to tackle assignments like this more confidently.