NR 228 Week 2 Three-Day Diet Analysis Example

Diet Analysis: Three Days of a 22-Year-Old Nursing Student Who Waits Tables on Weekends, Read for the Pattern Rather Than the Rows

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 228: Nutrition, Health & Wellness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Diet Analysis: Three Days of a 22-Year-Old Nursing Student Who Waits Tables on Weekends, Read for the Pattern Rather Than the Rows

The Record, Written While Eating

I kept this record on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, September 17 to 19, 2026, writing each entry in my phone's notes app within a few minutes of eating, with the time and an amount. I am 22, female, 165 centimeters and 61 kilograms, a full-time nursing student, and I wait tables at a restaurant on Friday and Saturday evenings from 1630 to 2330. Amounts were measured with a measuring cup when I ate at home and estimated by the width of my palm or the package label when I did not. I left in everything, including the handful of fries from the kitchen window at 2100 on Saturday, because a record tidied up would not show how I actually eat.

Table 1

Three-Day Food Record, September 17 to 19, 2026

Note. Water is recorded only where I drank it with a meal; I did not track water drunk at work.

Amounts a Tool Can Accept

I entered each item into the course's diet analysis tool using the closest match and the amount I recorded. Where the tool asked for grams and I had written a palm width or a handful, I used the tool's standard portion and noted it. The tool estimated my average intake over the three days at about 2,050 kcal a day, 13 grams of fiber a day and about 3,700 mg of sodium a day. Those numbers are estimates built on estimates, and I read them as a direction, not a measurement.

Reading a Pattern, Not a Row

Three patterns repeat across the days. The first is timing. On two of three days I ate nothing but coffee before noon, and on both work days I ate my largest meal at 2345, after the shift. The second is where the food came from. On the two work days, more than half of what I ate came from the restaurant's kitchen: the staff meal at 1600 and fries during the shift. The third is what is missing. Across nine meals and snacks, vegetables appeared once, as a cup of lettuce, and fruit once, as a banana.

Two numbers put those patterns in context. The Institute of Medicine's adequate intake for fiber is 14 grams per 1,000 kcal (Institute of Medicine, 2005), which at my intake would be about 29 grams a day; I averaged 13, less than half. And the National Academies' Chronic Disease Risk Reduction Intake for sodium is 2,300 mg a day (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2019); my estimated 3,700 mg is well above it, with most of the excess on the two work days, from fries, the quesadilla and the chicken tenders.

The two numbers point at the same pattern. The foods that raise my sodium are the same foods that replace the fruit and vegetables that would raise my fiber. It is not that I eat badly all the time; it is that on work days, the restaurant's food fills the space where anything else would go.

There is also a pattern in what I drank. Coffee with flavored creamer appeared every morning, and a 20-ounce diet soda on Thursday, but water appears only twice in the record. I work a seven-hour shift on my feet in a warm kitchen, so I suspect I drink more at work than I wrote down; I did not track it, which is itself a gap in the record. It is worth noting because thirst late in a shift may be part of why the fries at the kitchen window are hard to resist.

The One Change

The change is specific to the pattern. On work days, I will eat a real meal at home at 1500 before I leave, one I can make in ten minutes: a bowl of microwaved frozen mixed vegetables with a cup of leftover rice or pasta and an egg or a can of beans, and a piece of fruit to take with me. If I arrive at work fed, I expect to eat less of the staff meal and fewer fries during the shift, and the late meal at 2345 can be something small, like cereal and milk, which on Saturday was actually my best choice of the three days. I will check this by repeating the three-day record on the first weekend in October and comparing the tool's fiber and sodium estimates.

What a Short Record Cannot Show

Three days is a small sample, and these three days included two work days and no Sunday or Monday, when I eat at home with my roommate and cook more. The record may therefore overstate the weekend pattern and understate how I eat in the rest of the week. Self-recorded food is also known to be underreported, especially snacks, and I may have missed a few handfuls of fries or a second coffee at work. Finally, the tool's sodium figures depend heavily on which restaurant items it matched; the restaurant's own recipes may contain more or less. None of these limits changes the pattern, which is visible even with generous error, but they are the reason the analysis names a pattern and one change instead of a precise deficit.

References

Institute of Medicine. (2005). Dietary reference intakes for energy, carbohydrate, fiber, fat, fatty acids, cholesterol, protein, and amino acids. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10490

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2019). Dietary reference intakes for sodium and potassium. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25353