HW 11 - Project Part 1

I have been improving my diet for months before the food unit in order to get in better shape. I started by cutting out junk food, soda, white grains and fast food from my diet. Then I only ate foods with lots of protein and nutrition. This helped me lose wait, have more energy and helped me gain better self-control over my body. I was able to control my bad food urges but the new foods that I was eating were not always the best tasting if I didn’t have time to make it something good. So I cheated my diet by eating very small amounts of fast food to get the tastes I loved so much. Ultimately this disappointed me and when I was given this project I thought what I have been doing has helped me a lot by feeling better about myself and I wanted to help others.

Amhara came up with an idea or a dream, to make a facebook group that would be a protest against fast food for one week. There would be thousands of people invited and joining making it a movement. I liked the concept so I asked to join her group as an admin to work with her but she had already made the group. I became an admin then to just watch and see how people reacted because I did not agree with how she set the group up. People wrote on the wall as if it was a joke and criticized it saying one week is nothing you needed a real change by doing this for a month or for the rest of your life. I agreed because my food life style has changed because I keep up with my diet.

Ultimately the group did not get any buzz and I didn’t think that my original group idea was the right approach anymore. I thought about how people always want to be different and take challenges but not all people want to take the same challenge as everyone else. So I challenged my good friends as they challenged me to not eat fast food for a month and if succeed we would continue for another month but everyone would bring in one person they trusted to be part of this group. We saw each other on a regular basis so there was no reason to meet at certain times. When we meet we would tell stories about how the journey threw our food lives were going. For the first week the fast food world had be easy to leave for all of us but during the weekend it was tuff for some of us. During the weekend my friends were offered free fast food and it was hard but they turned it down. It took more time to make foods that tasted good, we had to do research to find healthy food places to grab fast meals not run by major corporations and it cost more money for this food.

My friends felt that the system of having someone close to you experiencing the same thing you were helped them stay on track because they didn’t want to fail someone they care about. The challenge they said was one of the things that drew them in because you always want to beat your best friend and to lose would be a big defeat. Then I had realized my activist goal had gone off track from making my group so exclusive people would want to join to a group a friends working to help one another be healthy. We did not stand as a number on facebook in the thousands, we had each other to look in the face and make sure we were living up to our challenge. We had to face the people we loved directly and tell the truth. Fast food is a drug you just want more. During the week so far I have felt more awake and full of energy.