Oh, you study nutrition? Must be really easy.

I started a new volunteer position today.  One of the receptionists in the post-natal clinic of the hospital asked what I study at school.  I told her that I'm in nutrition, aiming to become a dietitian.

Receptionist: Oh, that's neat.... must be really easy.
Me: Um.  Excuse me?
Receptionist: Well it's like, common sense, right?  Portion sizes and all that?
Me: *glowering* you'd be amazed how uncommon common sense can be. 
Receptionist: hahahahahhahaha.  So what do you do at school, like, just cooking or something?
Me: We're studying all aspects of food.  We do some cooking, but it's so that we can learn about food prep and modifications for patients who need them, about disease management with nutrition, nutrition needs at different stages of life, and consulting skills.  And dietitians do lots of things other than just talk about portion sizes, like community nutrition counselling and diabetes education, or they might work in clinical settings... like a breastfeeding centre? *looks at the room we are currently standing in*

Sigh.

As someone who works in a BREASTFEEDING CENTRE, you'd think that the receptionist would realize that hey, maybe nutrition people are needed to help these mothers and infants?  Mom needs to eat enough and consume enough of particular nutrients to satisfy not only her needs, but also the baby's needs.  Or maybe she thinks that the dietitian would tell the infant that they need to eat 6 portions of boobs every day.  *headsmack*  Not to mention that if all my program was about was cooking stuff, why would I be volunteering at a hospital in a place other than the kitchen?????  Seriously.

So let's set the record straight here.  Nutrition professionals work in a lot of different settings, and include many different levels of education and certification.  In a hospital setting, everyone from the receiving clerks and chefs to the people assembling trays on a belt line, to the dietary aides who deliver trays to rooms, to the dietitians and menu clerks who set the menu and therapeutic modifications (for allergies, soft/puree/minced diets, for illnesses like diabetes, etc), and everyone in between count as "nutrition professionals".  Each of these people has to obtain a certain level of education, usually specialized for their field (e.g. food technician training), and often have to obtain other certifications (such as a Food Handler's certificate, or registration with a regulatory body).  Every person in this flow of food has a special role in ensuring that every patient in the hospital receives the correct nourishment that is appropriate for their condition.  You wouldn't want to send a steak dinner up to someone who is supposed to be on a puree diet due to choking risk, or a pasta dinner to someone with Celiac disease.  Also wouldn't want to be serving up expired or improperly heated/cooled food - you don't want to make sick people even sicker. 

Common sense?  Maybe.  But try coordinating that common sense for a hospital with 300+ hungry people in it, many with special dietary needs. 

Dietitians do a lot more than just say "eat this, not that, this amount, this number of portions.  Go." Because really, that's unhelpful to everyone.  In clinical settings, dietitians might be involved in consulting with patients who have been recently diagnosed with a condition (heart disease, diabetes, Crohn's/colitis, severe food allergies, cancer, infections, recent surgeries, recently used a ventilator/breathing tube, diverticulitis, inflammation, stroke, oral diseases/dentures, swallowing difficulties, using certain medications that impair nutrient absorption, etc. etc. etc.), because for these people, the things that they can and can't eat are not "common sense".  For example, when my dad was undergoing chemo, numerous dietitians visited to talk about some of the dietary side effects of chemo -- foods that won't be appetizing and those that he'll want to try, ensuring that he meets his dietary needs with a reduced appetite, nausea and mouth sores (very common in chemo), medication effects on nutrition status, and a nutrition plan when he was released to ensure that his appetite returned to normal and he met his nutritional needs during recovery and remission.  Common sense?

I posted once before about some of the other roles of dietitians, so I won't bore you again with it :) One thing that I really wish I'd said about the portion size comment though was that hey - who do you think decides what a portion size is, or how many you're supposed to eat?  Ever wonder why the American version of the food requirements is different from Canada?  Ever seen one from Asia or Latin America (quite different!)?  Guess what.  There are nutrition professionals in government and public health offices too who figure this kind of stuff out :)



And for the record, I love my program because I love learning about food and want to educate, help, and heal people, not because it's easy.  Because it is not easy.  If it were that easy, there would be no need for dietitians to consult with patients or clients -- after all, its just common sense, right?

Half Marathon update

I have news about that half that I've been raving about.

I've been posting for the last two months about my activity, including the TYS10K run that I felt like crap about.  Here's what's happened since:

• After the 10K, I haven't run.  Not once.  I was so bummed out for the first week that I just couldn't bring myself to even think about running.  I don't even have a good excuse for it.  I was just really, really depressed over it.  I bought new running shoes and everything, believing that maybe having shiny new shoes would do it.  Nope.
• Then we went to Hawaii.  We got in lots of other kinds of activity, but no running.
• While in Hawaii, I got a wicked bad sunburn on the back of my legs on the last day.  Even the backs of my knees were fried.  Bad enough that sitting, standing, walking, or movement of any kind was a very big challenge.  It took almost a full week before I was able to even think about exercise again.  Went to yoga, and realized just how tight my muscles and fried skin were from a week of doing pretty much nothing but healing.

So.  These things have not been so helpful in training for a half marathon.  Three weeks without running, with the race only two weeks away, is simply not realistic.  After consultation with runner friends and seeing if there was any possibility of training enough in that short of a time, I've officially come to the conclusion that I will not be able to run the half marathon this year.

If you thought I was bummed out about the TYS10K results, you have no idea just how depressed I am about this decision.

However, I've decided to defer my run until the fall.  I haven't decided which run I will sign up for yet.  I had really been looking forward to the Toronto Women's Half as being my first :( 

Now that my skin is doing better, I've been doing some cardio activity and stretching to get my legs back into some sense of flexibility and ready to run again.  I'm working on developing a proper training plan, since clearly my last plan of "just run when you feel like it" wasn't a very good one.  Sadly, I have classes on all of the nights that the Running Room training clinics are going on, so it looks like I'm on my own.

As I develop a plan (and actually follow through with it), I will post my progress and helpful info for you, so that hopefully you won't get caught in the same place that I'm in now.

Sigh :(

Spring into Action Finale

Hey blog! Sorry I've been away for a bit, but I have a good excuse (really!).  Since my last post, boyfriend and I took off to Hawaii for some much needed post-exam R&R :)!

Neither of us are really "beach people".  I like sitting on a beach and being warm and sunny, sure, but I couldn't deal with doing that, and only that, every day.  I'd be bored in like, 5 minutes.  Luckily, my boyfriend is the same way :) so, we got in as much activity as we could so that we could still see Hawaii, and work off some of the extreme food and mai tais.  Since I can't remember what days we actually did what things, here's just a recap of the activity that we actually got in while we were there:

• Attempted surfing.  He was much more successful than I was, as I just fell over and got lots of salt water up my nose.  But it turns out that surfing is a RIDICULOUS upper body workout, since the majority of the time, you're lying face down and paddling using your arms.  My upper back and shoulders were still sore two days later!  I also managed to get an epic sunburn from my hips to my heels down the back of my legs.  Turns out that my sunscreen isn't nearly as waterproof as I was lead to believe :( I couldn't actually walk properly for the first two days.  Still can't comfortably sit down/stand up or bend my knees.
• Scuba diving.  Neither of us had ever tried it before, so hey, why not now?!  I found a great company that didn't charge a crazy amount, included all of the equipment you needed, two 1/2 hour dives, and a small group (only 3 of us) lead by an awesome instructor.  This was by far the best money that I spent in Hawaii.  We saw huge schools of colourful fish, an enormous crab, and TURTLES! 
• Bike riding.  We decided to rent a couple of bikes (pretty cheap, only $20 for the whole day) and ride from Waikiki to Hanauma Bay, a popular beach destination and protected environmental reserve.  When I Google mapped the route by bike, it claimed that it would take only about an hour and 15 minutes.  The longest I have ever rode a bike in my life was about 50 minutes, so I figured I would be able to do it.  Ummmm, yeah, turns out that it was actually TWO AND A HALF HOURS.  Each way.  And, on the way there, the steepest hill I have ever seen in my life.  The wind was also INSANE on the way out, punching me in the face for the full two hours.  By the time we got halfway, I was reeeeeeally struggling.  Between the wind and the hill, I was actually in tears trying my damn hardest to push along.  Had to stop a few times along the way and complained a lot to poor, poor boyfriend (who is a cyclist, and found this to be just a leisurely roll along the beach.  Jerk).  But - we made it!  After lunch and a well-deserved ice cream, we rode back with the wind at our backs.  We later learned that the ride was 27km each way, so a total of 54km round trip :)
• Hiking.  We took a 2 mile trail up to see Manoa Falls, a beautiful little waterfall in the middle of a rainforest.  My internet research suggested that the trail was slippery because of the humidity of a rainforest.  What I didn't expect was the MUD.  The entire trail was one giant mudslide.  So, the 2 mile walk was actually an epic uphill muddy crawl, not unlike a Warrier Dash or other crazy obstacle course.  It was quite pretty though, and well worth the messy shoes.
• Yoga.  We found a place that does yoga every day on the beach (literally, in the sand), and a couple of times per week in the park.  It was actually a pretty cool class, because the teacher caters to tourists by offering multilingual classes.  In our class, we were the only two people who spoke English, everyone else was Japanese.  So, the class was taught almost entirely in Japanese with random spurts of English for us (but we were able to follow along easily enough with the Japanese instruction).  We also walked to and from the class, about a 5k walk total.
• Walking.  Everywhere.  Waikiki is a pain in the butt to drive in (like any downtown area, there are one-way streets and traffic everywhere), so it was just easier to walk most places.  I'd guess that we walked about 5-8km every day at minimum.

It just goes to show that even on vacation, you can still get in activity every day, and still have an amazing time!  I would even say that by getting in some kind of activity each day, we saw a lot more of the island than we would have had we just stuck to the beach all the time.  Of course, we still got some beach time (because you can't go to Hawaii and NOT sit on a beach with a frilly drink), but we were quite happy to get back up after a short time and get moving again.

How do you get in activity when you're on vacation?