Introduction
Professionals in health care have to understand firsthand the means of improving patients’ lives. A way of doing so is for health care providers to strive to enhance their own lives. While there are various options for health promotion, one of the basics for most people is focusing on eating healthy foods. The goal that I have set for myself is improving nutrition and developing better eating habits.
Main body
I strive to change my lifestyle by participating in improving nutrition for the time of 30 days. My health promotion plan is based on eating more healthy foods with behavioral outcomes of preventing high blood pressure and sugar and eventually providing nutritional education (The Health Promotion Model, n.d.). My experience with this plan can be seen by looking at factors that promoted my success and barriers. My success can be characterized by Pender’s component of prior behavior, according to which I have researched types of healthier food choices and implemented the information into my eating habits (The Health Promotion Model, n.d.). The main barriers that I have experienced are a lack of commitment to a more nutritional lifestyle and temptations of unhealthy food options (The Health Promotion Model, n.d.). The basis of my plan is consuming a variety of fruits, grains, and vegetables. However, as each person is unique, people may need different diets, such as Mediterranean or Asian (Cena & Calder, 2020). Components of Pender’s health promotion model have helped in determining outcomes of my goal and identifying barriers and supporting factors.
Furthermore, Pender’s model can reflect the development, implementation, and evaluation of my plan. The development is based on the commitment to the plan of action and is focused on researching relevant information and making a list of healthier food choices (The Health Promotion Model, n.d.). The implementation of the plan consists of discarding unhealthy foods, creating menus for meals, and integrating them into my schedule. The evaluation of the plan can be done by evaluating the outcomes. However, as one of the outcomes is providing nutritional education, full evaluation can be done after accomplishing this part and assessing its results. Nevertheless, research shows that nutrition education can be beneficial in changing behavior (Naserpoor et al., 2018). With that being said, it is expected that plan based on Pender’s model will show positive outcomes.
Following that, evaluation of the goal at the deadline is connected to evaluation of the plan. While assessing the second outcome requires further work, the first outcome can be highly evaluated. So far, I can say that my experience was mostly positive as I found it easy to eat healthier foods and felt improvement in my nutrition. Moreover, research shows that a similar plan based on Pender’s health promotion model can positively affect nutritional behavior (Khodaveisi et al., 2017). However, research also proposes the assessment of final results two months after the deadline (Khodaveisi et al., 2017). Therefore, aside from evaluating the goal at the deadline, further estimation is needed to determine longer-lasting effects.
Summary
To summarize, as research shows, improving nutrition can be beneficial for people, and my own experience suggests that promoting healthy eating habits can have positive results. A plan focused on eating healthier foods can be applied in a clinical setting by determining outcomes for each patient and developing a diet appropriate for each individual. This experience can help me to better partner with patients by using research that I have done on the topic and expressing empathy to their struggles based on my practice of accomplishing a similar goal.
References
Cena, H., & Calder, P. C. (2020). Defining a healthy diet: Evidence for the role of contemporary dietary patterns in health and disease. Nutrients, 12(2), 1-15.
Khodaveisi, M., Omidi, A., Farokhi, S., & Soltanian, A. R. (2017). The effect of Pender’s health promotion model in improving the nutritional behavior of overweight and obese women. International Journal of Community Based Nursing and Midwifery, 5(2), 165-174.
Naserpoor, F., Zamani-Alavijeh, F., Shahri, P., & Saki Malehi, A. (2018). Effect of education based on Pender’s health promotion model on nutrition behavior of adolescent girls. Journal of Research and Health, 8(5), 394-402.
The Health Promotion Model: Manual. (n.d.). [Lecture notes].