5 Ways to Brighten Up Your Space

Look around your office, classroom, or cafeteria … do you see drab walls with outdated posters? Or do you see vibrant colors and positive messages? 

It might be time to brighten up your space. We have everything you need, and posters are just the beginning!

  1. Floor decals are a unique way to add some color and nutrition messages where people will be surprised to see them. 
  2. Walloons are balloon-shaped wall decals and they come in sets. 
  3. Salad bar and table top signs are appropriate for school and workplace cafeterias, plus they’re portable so you can take them to health fairs as well.
  4. Bulletin board kits give you a big bang for your buck. Posters, photos, and handouts make beautiful bulletin board displays with little work on your part.
    • With the Four Seasons poster value set, all you have to do is change the display every season and use the accompanying handouts, which include recipes, seasonal shopping lists, and seasonal fitness activities.
    • Or promote MyPlate with kits for adults and kids. Both kits come with beautiful color photos of healthy foods. 
  5. Posters are tried and true. And our posters are NOT boring. A few favorites:

Happy decorating!

Hollis Bass, MEd, RD, LD

 

MyPlate & New Year’s Resolutions

While everyone is prepping for the holidays, it’s time for nutrition and health educators to think about what comes next – New Year’s resolutions.

Year after year, people make – and fail to keep – diet-related resolutions. They usually vow to completely change how they eat, often by following a fad diet that is overly restrictive, thus setting themselves up for failure by February.

How can we set them up for success in 2020? By showing people how to make diet resolutions that are simple, science-based, and realistic. Diet resolutions they can keep for life! And we think MyPlate is the perfect place to start.

As a MyPlate National Strategic Partner, we’re proud to offer an amazing collection of MyPlate posters and other materials. Here are two that you can use to start a conversation about New Year’s resolutions:

  • The Healthy Plate poster is unique and sure to get people’s attention! Instead of the traditional MyPlate graphic, it uses beautiful illustrations to show the MyPlate concept. And it comes with a downloadable handout that has the traditional MyPlate graphic with tips on one side and a quiz on the other side.
  • Our MyPlate Photo poster includes the MyPlate graphic along with photographs of real food for each group. It also comes with a downloadable handout full of tips.

Just in time for the new year, USDA is launching Start Simple with MyPlate. This new campaign has some great resources to help with MyPlate-style New Year’s resolutions. Here are just a few of our favorites:

  • MyPlate Plan: Get personalized food group targets by entering your age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity level. There’s also a Spanish version. (Note: MyPlate Plan isn’t quite perfect yet. For us, it worked fine on Chrome, but not on Safari.)
  • MyPlate Plan Widget: Share MyPlate Plan with your clients and readers by embedding a widget on your website.
  • MyPlate Quizzes: These online quizzes are perfect for teaching the MyPlate concept. There’s one for each food group!
  • MyPlate Email Updates: Stay up-to-date on all things MyPlate by signing up at ChooseMyPlate.gov/GovDelivery.
  • MyPlate App get the link on this page and use the MyPlate app to stay on track all year!

I Am – New Poster for Diet and Lifestyle Motivation

The Nutrition Education Store has a new poster! The “I Am” poster is supportive and includes great messages about staying on track and not giving up.

This motivational health poster emphasizes the steps on your journey to a life of health and well-being. Affirmations serve as gentle reminders for self-care (sleeping enough, forgiving a setback), diet (eating mindfully when hungry, loving fruits & veggies), physical activity (moving more, exercising consistently), attitude (not giving up), and intention (planning and working to success).

These key phrases call out to people, encouraging them to slow down and read the poster. They recognize which steps they’ve taken and which ones may need more attention. Above all, they’ll realize that “I Am” in charge of taking these steps to the life I want to live.

Lessons from the I Am poster:

  1. Your journey to a healthier life takes planning and work, and starts with one step.
  2. Success comes from taking care of yourself, being kind to yourself, and not giving up.
  3. Physical activity means getting into the habit of moving more.
  4. Eating well means eating mindfully and learning to love healthy foods.
  5. Be mindful
  6. Encouragement and motivation
  7. One step starts a great journey
  8. Don’t give up
  9. Be consistent
  10. Empowering

Target population: In English, for general audiences, ages 12 – 100

Great for the classroom, gym, office, health fair, hallway, employee break room and more!

This poster is great for supporting all employees, clients, students, and patients on their journey to better health. It is part of a new diet and lifestyle motivational poster collection.

Who needs humor? Everyone!

We have a new category in our poster library: Health and Humor. We have collected our most fun and funny posters and included them in one collection for you to see. Here are just a few:

Research suggests that humor produces psychological and physiological benefits that help students learn.

Zak Stambor, Monitor, American Psychological Association
June 2006, Vol 37, No. 6, Print version: page 62

There are 12 different posters in this gallery. Imagine the delight when your staff, clients, patients, or students read about a “see-food diet” or try to outrun their fork (our newest poster)! They will stop reading their phones and start talking to each other. And they might remember some of your important lessons!

Here is a fun handout you can use now – it is about putting on your eating lights.