“Improving Mental Health and Reducing Anxiety through Diet and Exercise: An 8-Week Plan”

• Introduction
o Within this section, you should be clear to the assessor about where you are going with your goal. o Explain your current situation – you have already had a crack at doing this in workshop one assessment (but this time, with references)
o Current exercise – what are you doing? Are you meeting guidelines?
o Current dietary habits – as above.
o What are your barriers? This should help link in with the goal, so it flows nicely when we get to the next section. • Choose one goal that you want to achieve over eight weeks.
• o This can be a performance goal or a goal to reduce a chronic disease/condition.
o For example – Improving mental health by reducing anxiety levels through changes in diet and exercise. From here, you could state you completed the GAD-7 Anxiety Scale and scored “moderate anxiety” levels and would like to reduce this to “mild anxiety”. o Another example is reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease by reducing resting blood pressure through diet and exercise. Potentially stating your current blood pressure would be helpful here. o A performance goal – Improve cardiovascular fitness by reducing 10km time by 15 mins. o Another example is reducing the impact of fatigue during social soccer by increasing cardiovascular fitness. I can’t perform for more than 60 minutes and would like to improve my ability to stay active on the field for 90 minutes. o Strategies (choose 3).
 Can be 2 x diet related, 1 x exercise-related or 2 x exercise-related, 1 x diet-related. Up to you!
 Strategy to improve mental health: Find research to demonstrate what exercise is beneficial for this. Engage in 30 minutes of moderate-intensity training five days per week.
 Then you write a paragraph on the research behind the impact of exercise on anxiety, the type of training, and duration – essentially, any strategy you choose must be backed with scientific research.
• Diet Plan
o One-week plan
o You need to demonstrate you are meeting guidelines.
o Detail the food consumed for EVERY MEAL & SNACK. o Based on your strategies you will provide extra detail. For example, if one strategy is to ensure you are consuming 2g protein/kg body mass each day, you would need to demonstrate and calculate where this is coming from in each meal.
o Or, if a strategy was to consume med diet, you could potentially calculate the med-diet score for the week and have that as a summary at the bottom of your table
• Exercise Plan
o 8-week plan
o The key here is to stick to the FITT principle.
o Again, you must show that your program meets guidelines (australian diet and exercise) as a minimum. o Duration, intensity, type o Progression is also essential. I will explain this in a little more detail when I complete a recording next week
• Conclusion/justification
o Bring it all together, summarise the above information.
o Explain why you choose exercise intensity, duration and type of training. 