Unit 2 Reflection

Health is the measure of our bodies efficiency and over all well being.  Being healthy means you have a good balance of all of the five pillars of health, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, and social. We learned that nutrition is really important because the nutrients support growth and energy needs, also its important to exercise often because it keeps you healthy and helps strengthen your body.  Sleep is extremely important because it gives your body time to rest and restore, stress deals with managing constant changes to your body and mind, so its important to manage stress well.  Your social life is the way we interact with our environment, so when you have a poor social life it can cause stress, keeping a good social life will help keep you healthy.  For my personal health, I would say I'm an averagely healthy person.  For nutrition, there were certain things I should change, like eating more seafood, and less salty foods. My social life is good, I have a really good group of friends that keep me happy.  I play sports everyday for the correct amount of time, and for sleep I get a but under what I should be.  I get very little sleep during the week, and then on weekends I sleep for a very long time, so I need to find a balance so that I can get into having a normal sleep schedule. That would help me be more motivated and it would help me focus during school.

This unit taught me a lot of things that can be applied to my life, which was very helpful. I learned more about the foods we should be eating and why we need them. For example, we need proteins for energy (if needed), repair and maintenance, hormones, and the transportation and storage of molecules.  Also I learned why its so important to stay hydrated, because all of our cell and organ functions depend on it, and it helps regulate our body temperature.  For exercise, Mr.Orre  told us what types of exercise there are, what intensities you should be doing, the three metabolic pathways, and how much exercise we should be getting in order to stay healthy. You should be getting 150-300 minutes of moderate to high intensity exercise.  We learned about sleep and the hormones that effect our sleep, like cortisol and melatonin.  Cortisol is a hormone that is secreted by the adrenal glands and it tells your brain that its daytime and it wakes you up. Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, it causes you to feel sleepy.  Most teenagers need around 9-10 hours of sleep a night and when you don't get enough sleep, your sleep debt keeps adding up.  Mr.Orre also told us about stress, when its good and when its bad.

Something I didn't fully understand was the hormones lesson, about insulin, leptin, leptin resistance, glucagon and cortisol.  To improve for the next unit I will make sure I get enough sleep so that in class I am awake and alert, also I will make sure I take good notes, and study better for the unit test.  I can connect this unit to my life because I play sports everyday, so it helped me understand why it is important, also all of the topics we learned about helped me learn how to improve my health. For example I play waterloo, which is good exercise, plus it also effects my social life, we have a very close team, and we have a stronger team because we get along so well together.

Nutrition

Goals Sheet

Exercise/Social