Sa-Shai Daniels' Portfolio

In wellness and fitness class I have grown immensely but I have grown the most in my ability to accept myself for the person that I am. In the past I’ve often struggled with seeing the good in myself. I always used to focus on what I needed to fix about myself. Lately in class we’ve been focusing on mental health and the issues that it can cause for people. When we talked about eating disorders in class I found it shocking how people could dislike themselves so much that they would do something like starve themselves. I realized that if I continued to dislike the person that I am I could easily end up doing something to hurt myself. I think that focusing on the good things about myself has done a lot to help my self-esteem.

The learning endeavor that has most supported my growth would have to be the daily preps that we do in at the beginning of most classes. On one of them we were asked to list five things that we liked about ourselves. This specific question was sort of a wakeup call to me because I could hardly think of anything to write down, which is completely ridiculous because there are plenty of wonderful thing about me but I was blind to it. One of the other things that we’ve started doing at the beginning of some classes is writing down something about ourselves that we are proud of. I’ve never been forced to think of what I liked about myself so this pushed me to do just that.

The artifact that I would include to show my how the daily preps have helped me to grow in wellness and fitness would be the daily prep that we had to list things good things about ourselves which I sadly only listed three things. The other artifact I would show is the list that I am currently still working on of things that I am proud of. I think these daily preps show how far of come in accepting myself and learning to love the person I am.

The second learning endeavor that prompted my growth would the activity in which we had to create a product that would promote health habits and good body image. For this activity my group was assigned the task of creating a magazine. This was particularly tricky because most magazines are trying to get you to buy products that will change the way you look or act. We decided that our magazine wouldn’t have photo shopped images of models or actors because when people see pictures like that it makes them feel discontent with what they look like and they then aim to be more like the people on the covers of magazines. Instead of models my group decided we would use pictures of diverse groups of regular people for our cover. This project helped me because I often compare myself to other people and wish that I could look just a little more like them but now I realize that the most of the pictures on the covers of magazines aren’t even real. This activity helped me understand that the people that I constantly compare myself are actually no better or worse than me.

The artifact I would use to show my growth would be the list me and my group made about things that our magazine needed to have vs. what most magazines had. I think this artifact would do a great job at showing everything wrong with magazines today and what we can do to change that and help people think better of themselves.