In my previous post, I explained why obesity is an issue that more people should care about. It can have fatal effects on your health and it disproportionately affects POC, lower class people, and people with less education. After researching the ways that others are helping to fight against obesity, I noticed that there weren’t many people with social media accounts related to the issue. However, I’ve found that there are organizations such as https://www.obesity.org/ that are focused on obesity research. They accept donations, so I’ve included a link to their website in my linktree. This brings me to what I did to be an agent of change!

I created an Instagram account to help educate people about obesity, encourage people to drink water, make healthy meals and snacks, participate in healthy challenges, and learn ways to relax and de-stress. Some of my posts include reminders to drink water, so I researched the benefits of doing so in order to make sure I had my facts straight. Giving people a reason to do something is always better than just telling them to do it! I’ve been designing my posts using PicsArt, an artsy app. It’s very easy to navigate and there’s so much I can do with it! My goal is to have my posts look simple and professional while also being colorful and fun. As stated earlier, I also make a linktree with links to places to donate, a relaxing music playlist, and any information mentioned in my posts. Although I tried putting it in my bio, Instagram is currently not letting me edit my profile! This has happened before and it usually works after a day or so.

Making my profile picture in the PicsArt app!

Creating a custom color in the PicsArt app for the background of a post!

So far, my experience with the account has been positive. I sent an email to everyone in my stream to gain followers and my first post did well! I plan on starting a week-long challenge this coming Monday, but I’ll have more posts up before then! In addition, I’ve been keeping an eye out for healthy snacks to post about, especially snacks that are healthy alternatives to unhealthy foods. For example, I recently posted a recipe for frozen grapes with lime juice as a healthy alternative to sour patch candy!

My account’s profile before sending the stream email

My account’s profile after sending the stream email

Overall, I love how my project is turning out. I think the ideas are there, but I wish I’d started posting earlier. I learned that orange stream is really supportive of everyone’s ideas and projects! I think we all pushed each other to create great projects and everyone was ready and willing to help their classmates out. There is still more work to be done for my Instagram account to be successful and I think I can really make a change if I continue to post! Please check out my account @fight__against_obesity if you haven’t already!

Annotated Bibliography

I wanted to focus on obesity because I can help not only educate people about how to stay healthy to avoid obesity and its negative effects, but also about how much obesity prevalence varies based on race, income, and even education. In addition, this issue is important to me because obesity cases are going up every day and they will continue to do so unless we make a change. Although it may seem easy to prevent obesity, it really depends on the person and their unique situation. There’s way more things to factor in than you might think, but I’ll explain more about that later.

To start off, what is obesity? How is it different from just being overweight? How do you know if you’re obese? Obesity is diagnosed based on someone’s weight in comparison to their height and age. This is called BMI, or body mass index. It’s used to find out how much body fat a person has. Because this system doesn’t directly measure your body fat, it can sometimes be inaccurate with muscular people, such as athletes. Generally though, obesity is diagnosed when a person has a BMI over 30. To put that into perspective, a 5’5 woman would have to weigh a minimum of 180 lbs to be considered obese. She’d have to weigh 150 lbs to be considered overweight. If she weighed between 115 and 145 lbs, she’d be at a healthy weight. As you can probably tell, being obese and being overweight are not the same thing. You’re at a healthy weight if your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you’re overweight if it’s between 25 and 29.9, and you’re obese if it’s 30 or more. Simply put, obesity is just a more severe version of being overweight. If you want to find out your BMI, the quickest way to do so is by using a BMI calculator. It multiplies your weight in pounds by 704.5, divides that by your height in inches, and then divides that number by your height again.

A combination of weight and height makes up your BMI

Now, I said before that obesity cases are going up and it’s becoming a bigger problem every day, but just how many cases are there? According to State of Childhood, “[In America,] adult obesity rates now [September 2020] exceed 35% in 12 states, 30% in 35 states and 25% in 48 states.” 23 out of 50 states had an adult obesity rate between 30% and 34.9%. That’s a lot of obesity cases! But why is this bad? What’s the worst that can happen to someone with obesity? NIDDK says that “Overweight and obesity are risk factors for many health problems such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, joint problems, and gallstones, among other conditions.”

Chart from State of Childhood Obesity

So what causes obesity? How can it be prevented? Very Well Health has some tips. In addition to the more well-known strategies such as staying active and following a healthy diet, getting adequate sleep every night is vital to having a healthy lifestyle. Some basic principles of healthy eating are limiting processed foods, artificial sweeteners, and saturated fats; drinking more water; and eating five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables a day. It’s recommended that the average adult gets at least 150 minutes of exercise per week, or 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. This seems like a lot, right? What about things to avoid in order to prevent obesity? Well, chronic stress has been proven to cause weight gain, so it’s important to take time to relax by doing yoga, listening to music, or meditating. Also, a late bedtime is known to have bad effects on the body, one of which is weight gain. The recommended nightly amount of sleep for adults is 7 or more hours. Lastly, Mayo Clinic says that “the number of hours you spend in front of a screen is highly associated with weight gain.” This is part of why some people have started using standing desks or biking desks during the pandemic. This is a great way to stay active if you have to be in front of a computer for many hours a day.

A biking or standing desk is a convenient way to avoid sitting at a desk all day while still getting work done.

According to the CDC, the problem with obesity isn’t just the effects and the overall number of cases, but also the disproportionality in cases based on socioeconomic status. As a reminder, “obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer that are some of the leading causes of preventable, premature death.” Obesity isn’t bad only because it comes with some major health risks, but it also contributes to inequality in the US. There are, unfortunately, certain factors that can unfairly influence whether or not one ends up with obesity. Take race for example. As of 2017-18, non-hispanic black adults had the highest obesity prevalence (49.6%), followed by hispanic adults (44.8%), non-hispanic white adults (42.2%), and non-hispanic asian adults (17.4%). In terms of education, the CDC reported that “overall, men and women with college degrees had lower obesity prevalence compared with those with less education.” In addition, the CDC found that income directly affects obesity rates. A pattern was observed: people in the highest income group had a lower obesity prevalence compared to that of those in the middle and lowest income groups. All of this shows that obesity is dangerous not only to the health of the American population, but to the people who are at a disadvantage solely because of race, education, or income.

To sum things up, I’ve learned a great deal about obesity in the short time I’ve been studying it. I find it fascinating how differently each individual is affected by it because of how different their situation is from the next person. In the future, I want to learn more about how genetics affect your chances of being obese. I didn’t focus as much on that as I could’ve because it was more important to learn about how dangerous obesity is, but I’m happy with the amount of research I’ve done overall. It’s helped me understand obesity in depth and I’m glad I chose it as my topic.

Annotated Bibliography

I was influenced by Trevor Noah’s stories about people making assumptions about his culture. He was often seen as threatening because he was colored, like when he went to jail and put on the stereotypical tough colored guy persona in chapter 17. Some Jews choose to keep kosher, which means that they won’t ever eat meat and dairy in the same meal or even use the same dishes to avoid mixing them. People often assume that because I am Jewish, I keep kosher, which is often confused with being vegan. I don’t keep kosher, nor am I a vegan, yet people tend to make assumptions based on my culture just like they do about Trevor. On page 154 of Born a Crime, Trevor explains that there is a code for mothers in the hood. If you’re not busy and they ask if they can “send you,” you always say yes. This resonated with me because Jews have a similar code. When someone is part of your culture, you don’t have to know them personally to be kind to them. Just like Trevor Noah, I used my vignette as a way to inform my readers about my culture while also using some humor to make my story interesting. I also focused on my perspective of the story and didn’t use much dialogue. I think that humor plays a big part in both Trevor’s and my writing. It makes the reader want to continue reading the story because it eliminates any dull moments. I explained my culture to the reader by defining Hebrew terms clearly, like I was describing them to a friend, which I have plenty of experience with. I also highlighted some of the negative aspects of my culture in order to make my description more personal. My vignette explains the way that culture can affect a person’s identity by providing real-life examples of what it’s like to be part of Gen Z Jewish culture and showing the way it affected my identity through my writing style. I tend to use formal vocabulary with a casual tone, which I feel represents my personality perfectly.

Click above for a look at my project!

Artist’s Statement- For this project, I wanted to create something that highlighted the imperfections of 2020. A calendar, I thought, was the best way to do this, because calendars give an overview of the events in a given month. As I gave it more thought, I decided that it was the way to go because, using a calendar, I wouldn’t need many words to sum up 2020 from my point of view. I think it’s really cool to be able to tell a story using very few words and not even complete sentences! As you may have noticed, I used 3 different colors of text on the calendar. Blue text means it was scheduled to happen already, purple means it was scheduled or rescheduled because of the pandemic, and red means it was a bad thing that was scheduled or rescheduled because of the pandemic. I made my calendar by reflecting on the events of this year and writing everything down along with their approximate dates. Next, I created a calendar template and filled it in according to my memories of 2020 so far. In true calendar spirit, I added my own pictures for each month that help tell the story of what happened that month. I hope there are no more red events to add to my catastrophic calendar this year!