Being a student is not always the healthiest lifestyle, and sometimes students need a little push in the right direction, or the right food information to be readily available for their fast-paced lives.
Registered Dietician Leah Carter is also a Bakersfield College nutrition professor. On March 24 she held an Obesity Workshop.
The workshop was targeted at eating habits and lifestyle changes that will be productive for the weight loss goal of each individual student. The workshop did not draw a big crowd, but those in attendance were taking notes.
Carter stated that the workshop in the executive boardroom at BC was in honor of National Nutrition Month, in which the focus for that month is teaching and spreading the information about nutrition and wellness to the communities.
During the workshop, Carter discussed a lot of misconceptions and myths and clarified the real answers for those in attendance.
“There is no special diet or weight loss products that can make you lose the weight and keep it off. Dieting is only temporary so you lose the weight while on the diet, and then you gain the weight back once you’re off,” Carter said.
Carter used visual aids to help during her presentation, in which she shows the audience a short video taken from a morning show that discussed portion sizes and weight loss. The video gave viewers an example of a meal, such as a slice of pizza or a hamburger. The video then showed the amount of calories each meal entails as well as the amount of fat.
For shock value Carter showed an actual pound of fat and an actual pound of muscle, as she explained how many calories it takes to take make one pound of each.
“Americans need to eat less and move more. It takes 35,000 calories to equal one pound of fat or muscle and most of these fast food meals are at least half the daily calorie count. In order to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you intake,” said Carter.
Carter closed her presentation with a few words of health wisdom and passed out a flier that was titled “25 ways to Think Thin.”