Synthesis, without realizing it!

What I did:
I brought my information and webs over to Kate’s house to compare what I had found to what she was doing, LA Weight Loss. When I had talked to her about this meeting the day before, she mentioned that LA Weight Loss focused on eating a certain number of starches, proteins, vegetables, and fruits a day. While I was looking through my notes, I remembered that I hadn’t compared my food pyramids (USDA, Healthy Living, Mayo Clinic) yet and the food pyramids are based on the number of times you should eat the different food groups a day. It sounded similar to what she was doing and I was interested in how it compared.

We started by looking at the LA Weight Loss plan. She showed me the journal that they have to keep every day. She needs to record what she eats for breakfast, am snack, lunch, pm snack, and dinner. She also needs to check how many servings she has had of each food group. These three things confirmed some of the ideas that I found. There was one major thing missing from this idea, calorie count. I discovered through my research that calories are what causes you to gain/loose weight and a portion size is what determines the number of calories that you have eaten. The only thing that LA Weight Loss was concerned with was servings/portions of food groups. I realized that there are serving recommendations on each food pyramid. For example, you should have 6-11 servings of grains a day based on the USDA pyramid, at most meals on the Healthy Living Pyramid, 4-8 servings on the Mayo Clinic pyramid, and 2 servings with LA Weight Loss. Why were there different recommended serving on each chart? Well, the more I investigated, the serving were based on different levels of caloric intake. The Mayo Clinic was based on 1,200 calories a day, USDA was based on 2,000 calories a day, it wasn’t listed for the Healthy Living Pyramid and LA Weight Loss. Looking more closely at my tables, the USDA provided eating patterns at different caloric levels. Kate and I focused on the 1,600 caloric intake level because that is how much we though we were eating. By spreading all of these models on the floor, we realized that even though LA Weight Loss did not count calories, they were doing the same thing. LA Weight Loss restricts the number of servings you can have of food groups. That is how they are controlling the calories you eat without counting calories. The serving sizes for each food group seemed pretty comparable (I didn’t make a chart or anything, we were just eyeballing it), with the exception of the grain group.

I was still wondering about how LA Weight Loss only allows for 2 servings of grains when all the other ones want you to have at least one with each meal/snack. Kate was telling me about how you can eat certain things together and it counts as a protein, even when carbs are present. For example, if she has a bowl of cereal with milk, that is considered a protein, not a serving of grain and protein. She also mentioned that she has to eat two LA Lite bars a day that are like granola bars. The light bulb immediately went off. On LA Weight Loss she is still eating many servings of grains, but she is categorizing some of them as proteins and LA Lites. I guess I was so infatuated with grain servings more than any other because I did the Atkins diet last year that restricted a lot of grain from your diet.

The Healthy Living Pyramid actually has daily exercise at the bottom of the pyramid. Furthermore, LA Weight Loss has that as part of their daily journal. Through my research, I realized that weight gain occurs when your caloric intake is greater than the amount of calories you use. Exercise boosts caloric output, especially with the development of muscle, as muscle burns more calories than fat does.

I realized that with all of these plans, the idea is to make sure you are having balanced meals all day while watching your total caloric intake through portion control and exercise. Oh my gosh, did I figure out how to answer to my biggest question just by talking to Kate? (How do I develop healthy eating habits for weight management and for life?) I think I did! At the same time, I realized that I had all of the information that I needed. I was really excited and very motivated to get this all finished. I just needed to apply what I learned to figure out how I can apply it to me!

When I got home, I looked at the different diagram types and realized that a comparison matrix would be the best way to actually get the number of servings for each model down on paper so I could compare them more in-depth. I found this graphic organizer at http://www.graphic.org/commat.html. A comparison matrix helped me answer the questions of how the pyramids were alike in serving size and how they were different. Click here to see the matrix that I developed: http://portfolio.iu.edu/kaabaker/calorie.matrix.doc. In this matrix I averaged the high and low serving numbers to get a better handle on the number of servings I should have a day. I also then took the formula to determine the number of calories I should eat in a day at my weight level: (10cal/1lb) + (% of activity level) + (10% for digestion cals) = total calories. My total calories came out to be about 1,900 calories. To start to loose weight, I found that many people decrease their caloric intake by about 500 calories. That puts me at about 1,400 calories a day. In my matrix, I then included the number of servings per day I needed based on this calorie level. It came out pretty close to the averages that I calculated.

Synthesis, in the Research Cycle developed by Jamie McKenzie, is defined as looking for patterns or some kind of picture by arranging and rearranging the information until patterns and pictures begin to emerge. As I think back to everything that I have done to sythesize my information, I too have arranged and rearranged my information by talking with Kate, creating the two webs, and creating the comparison matrix. I believe that this rearranging really helped me view all of my information in different ways and allowed me to make connections that might not have been made otherwise.

What I learned:
Collaboration facilitated synthesis:
Kate and I both new a lot about nutrition and by talking about it we developed new questions that questioned the information that we had (like the number of grain servings). We answered these questions together by analyzing our data and making sense of all of the pyramids and the LA Weight Loss approach. After our conversation, I knew exactly what I needed to do to finish answering my overarching question.
Again, graphic organizers saved the day!
It allowed me to do an organized comparison on paper. It served as a very helpful visual for me to develop conclusions from.

What I can apply to my teaching:
· Students need to understand the value in collaboration. Some collaboration occurs naturally, but I think that there is an innate tendency in all of us to individualize projects where we are only involving ourselves. Students need to be given more opportunities to collaborate with their peers, teachers, and experts within the inquiry process, especially at this critical stage. This will be made a deliberate part of the inquiry process at several points.
· Students need to have access to graphic organizers, whether it is through a teacher scaffold or through students knowledge based on prior experiences using graphic organizers.