One of my dietetics this semester is the Nutritional Assessment Lab. We do a lot of really cool stuff in this lab - so far we've done height and weight measurements, BMI, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratios, skinfold measurements, body composition measurements, bone density, blood glucose, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and... other stuff. And what makes this lab super interesting is that we get to find out all this information for ourselves.
Last week I found out that I have very high bone density. This is relieving; I've actually wondered if I have rather low bone density for my age. I feel like all growing up I didn't really drink much milk, because we always had powdered milk at my house (which I really extremely don't care for). However, I did eat a ton of cheese, so I guess I got enough calcium from that.
This past week we did a lab that required a lot of finger pricking for blood glucose, hematocrit (measures the percent of blood that is red blood cells) and hemoglobin. I was kinda laughing to myself after this lab. For me, pricking myself two or three times and getting drops of blood was no big deal, I do it all the time, and I know how to get blood. However, when people came back from the lab into the conference room were we finish our reports, I heard a lot of people saying stuff like "I feel like a pincushion" and "that was so hard!" and other things along those lines. Now I know that it was easy for me because I'm used to it, and if I wasn't I'm sure it would be more challenging too. But it still made me smile.
Also, I found out last week that I am 25% fat. It blows my mind sometimes how much fat women need to have to be able to do important stuff like have babies. Did you know that, generally speaking, you need to have between 17-20% body fat to even menstruate? (Am I allowed to talk about stuff like this on a blog...?)
1 comment:
yes. oh yes, you are. :)
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