Personal Philosophy Statement Sample

In today’s society obesity has become a nationwide epidemic that is affecting children and adults daily. Dietitians have an essential role in the health field to treat patients with nutrition problems such as obesity, but every patient is different and how the dietician decides the course of treatment is as well. For example, there are many ways the dietician can treat the patient like goal setting, self-monitoring, meal preparation, and other strategic plans that lead to the best health of the patient. When making a plan to treat the patient many detailed factors come into play. For example, patients age, occupation, family history, and most importantly social environment.

My father was raised in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood in New York City. Along with other immigrant families, he grew up in the basements of tenement buildings. When he left home at 17, set out to quickly assimilate into what he viewed as mainstream America. This included raising me as an American first. As a result, I lacked a connection to my culture. I knew nothing about Dominican culture, food, or music. I yearned to learn more about my cultural identity.

I was born in Iran to Afghan parents who fled Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Iran is notorious for denying basic human rights to refugees and my family was no exception. Although I was born in Iran, I nor any other member of my family held a fraction of the rights granted to Iranian citizens. I recall the undercover police officers the Iranian government had who looked for Afghan refugees in order to force out of the country. My parents did not want us to continue to face the same problems and racist treatment so they went to the United Nations to seek refuge. After a year of grueling interviews, medical tests, and security checks, we were informed that Canada would take us in. Being only 11 years old, I remember feeling thrilled that we were going to a better place. Canada did not fail to disappoint as we were welcomed with warmth and treated with equality.

Currently, I have been working as a community nutritionist for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children for over a year and half. My job responsibilities at the office include determination of eligibility of clients, assessment of nutritional health risks, and presentation of nutrition

In 2015, we estimated that 107.7 million children and 603.7 million adults were obese worldwide (The GBD 2015 Obesity Collaborators. 2017.). These numbers will continue to rise because of many reasons. There are quite a few families that rely on convenience, so instead of cooking a healthy home cooked meal some families will eat fast food simply because it is easy and quick. Some families may not have time because they are busy with work or other social activities. As a nurse, we can educate parents and their children about healthy lifestyles like eating habits and the importance of

Food For Thought (FFT), an organization founded in 2016, is one of my most prideful activities of completion. FFT is a local food pantry that is run by National Honor Society (NHS) members. Members pack food that feeds over twenty students and families each week. After I was elected Vice-President of NHS, I was offered the presidential position alongside another colleague to run the pantry. Working within the pantry allowed me to care for my community, gain morality and change the world. The world will change when individuals take action and I was honored to do just that through FFT.

As a Nutrition Services Hostess at the Medical Center of Plano, I enjoyed interacting with patients to ensure they were served appropriate and satisfying food. During this experience, I witnessed nutrition counseling by dietitians and communicated with dietitians about patients. Although clinical dietetics is not my primary career focus, I look forward to the clinical rotations of the dietetic internship. Having experience in clinical dietetics will help me accomplish my goal of influencing nutrition policy because it will provide further insight on how policy impacts this area of dietetics.

Today’s way of life is less physically active and more sedentary. Obesity in America has been on the rise amongst our children largely due to unhealthy eating habits. Excessive body fat that is stored in the body and can cause many health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea and depression. A step toward curing the obesity epidemic is through nutritional education at a young age because change becomes harder with time, lifestyle changes and decreasing metabolism.

There is a problem within the U.S. that affects many of our youth. One in four children within the borders of our country will become obese at a young age. Of that fraction, 70% of those children will become obese adults. The topic of childhood obesity seems to be an issue that many individuals disregard. My research shows that there are many underlining factors that contribute to obesity at a young age. These include lack of physcial education and also lack of parental control in terms of eating habits of the wrong foods. It is very important for parents to educate themselves on the products that they allow their children to consume.

From a very young age my parents instilled in me a deep appreciation for literature. Horacio Quiroga, Richard Bach, Louisa M. Alcott, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéri were some of the writers that played a fundamental role in my development as a reader and writer. Nonetheless, the pursuit of my intellectual goals has never been as straightforward as I envisioned growing up. Although I completed my junior and senior years of high school in the United States, I returned to my native Dominican Republic upon graduation, where I began a licenciatura en letras at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD). Spring 2008 was my first semester and, unbeknownst to me, it would also be my last. During my brief time at UASD, I became acutely aware of the tensions between political parties during times of campaign and experienced what would become one of the worst protests in the history of the university. I managed to escape the riot before policemen threw tear gas, but the gunshot sounds and the chaos that invaded the library were frightening enough to make me reevaluate

I would like to work as a pediatric dietitian to support children and their families, that are just as scared as my family was five years ago. The Clinical Pediatric Nutrition concentration offered by the Duke University Hospital dietetic internship offers the unique opportunity to focus specifically on my career goals while working towards becoming a Registered

My path to medicine has been rather non-traditional. However, my arrival to the field comes with reason and purpose. My interest in medicine does not stem from family pressure or financial gain, but rather my interest in science and my observation of need. In the additional time it took me to choose the path of medicine, I have accumulated many experiences. The largest contributor to my inspiration in osteopathic medicine is an illness I experienced in my early twenties. This death experience occurred in a medically underserved area. It would be easy for me to write pages explaining the event, but to be frank the disease gave me a disturbingly insightful view.

Obesity has a profound effect on a child’s life; an obese child is more likely to become an obese adult. Proper nutrition habits start as soon as the child is born, overfeeding an infant can affect the way the child perceives food. The parent is held accountable for what and how much their child eats and drinks. The community, churches and schools all play an important part of this growing epidemic. These same neighboring corporations should play a part in maintaining a healthy diet and implementing modifications when needed. Whose responsible and how do we as the adult prevent this from becoming a bigger epidemic.

The older I have gotten the more I have realized what really describes me as a person. I have been put through many tasks and challenges that were meant to change the way my personality tree has grown. School, friendship, losses, and gains have formed the clay I call my life and I am grateful for what my life has cooked up for me. These challenges have shown me what matters the most in life and what matters the least. More importantly they have shaped the way my personality is put into context today. Many people, famous or not, share the many personality traits and ideals I cherish and show every day. Many of them have described these ideals with famous words that have been remembered by many people for many years. There are three quotes I have heard and remembered that I take into context every day that describe me fully as a person. As a person I care most about one thing, family. Family is wholeheartedly the most important thing in my life. With that being said loyalty is one of my major rules and traits to live by on an everyday basis. Staying loyal and trustworthy to my peers, friends, and family has changed the way I think and act regularly. A trait I rarely recognize but think my personality tree was watered with when growing up was optimism. Optimism runs through my blood thanks to my mother and father who are the two most optimistic figures in my life. The links are evident to why and how my personality chain was put together throughout my life.

The medical profession focuses heavily on the elimination of fat despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that weight-loss efforts during childhood are largely unsuccessful and can be harmful both physically and psychologically (Solovay 200, 38). Children often replace their childhood goals with the improbable aim of lasting weight loss. Success rates for childhood dieting with long lasting weight loss have been determined to be around two to five percent (Solovay 2000, 38). Parents are often urged by medical professionals to put their children on low-calorie or very low-calorie diets with the good intention of long lasting weight loss. Unfortunately reduced calorie diets often open the gateway to disordered eating. Altering metabolism and affecting normal satiety signals are common repercussions of childhood dieting (Solovay 2000, 39). According to Bill Fabrey, founder of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, "Surveys reveal that children as young as the fourth grade are dieting, and are developing eating disorders. Yet public health statistics tell us there is an ever-increasing proportion of fat kids in the population, despite well-intentioned efforts by millions of parents to encourage weight loss in their offspring. Obviously