[TOEFL Independent essay: A healthy diet to improve health]

Please evaluate my essay, thank you =)

Out of the following three things, which one would you prefer to regulate in order to improve your health?
1. the kind of food you eat
2. the amount of exercise
3. the amount of stress in your life

how to straighten out the organism?

In recent years, the awareness of fitness and health has been raised. People try to improve their own health condition, either by working out more or reducing their stress. However, neither of them is as important as a healthy diet. In my opinion, I would choose to pay more attention on the food I consume in order to boost my health.

First of all, there is a wide variety of food I can choose to keep a healthy diet. For example, salads are easy to make and are nutritious as well. Or I can simply cook my own food instead of having meals in other restaurants. This definitely saves a lot of money and guarantees dishes without that many additives. Some people may assume that eating clean means taking in food with plain taste or hardly edible cuisines. In fact, healthy food can be quite delicious and eating always keeps me happy. Compared to exercising or finding ways to relax, I believe choosing the food I eat undoubtedly provides me with more options.

Secondly, it is apparently easier to regulate what I eat than to be determined to do exercise or to relax. Sometimes, I just don't have time to go to the gym or go for a run. After a long day of working or studying, fatigue strikes me and I don't have more energy and time to work out. Nevertheless, I need to eat. I simply have to be more careful on what I eat, and in this way my health status can be improved. In addition, it is obvious I cannot easily limit the stress in my life. I cannot foresee the challenges and frustration that I am going to encounter. Therefore, it is more difficult to cut down on the amount of stress than to examine the food I eat.

Health is extremely indispensable and everyone should be able to take care of his/her own body. I am strongly convinced that keeping a healthy diet is a better way to improve both the physical and the mental health.

Thanks for the patience and help!

Lee, since you were being asked a direct question in the prompt, you could have done a better job at representing the opening statement in order to make it more interesting to the examiner. If the examiner finds your presentation interesting, he will be more inclined to give you a higher score in the TA aspect of the test. I would have written the opening hook, not paraphrase, in the following manner:

There are 3 things that a person can regulate in life in order to improve his health. Some would prefer to increase their time of exercise, while others would prefer to reduce their stress levels. Personally, I prefer to control the types of food that I eat in order to improve my health. I opted for this choice for a number of reasons.

Firstly...

Do you see how I was able to create my own proper prompt or discussion requirement based upon the provided information? That is the aim of this test and that is what you should provide. Don't treat it like a common prompt because this is somewhat of a "free topic" essay discussion with very minimal instructions provided. Use that freedom to highlight your TA and GRA abilities. Overall, the discussion you present is good. When combined with a killer opening statement, I am sure you will score highly on the actual test.

@Holt
Thank you so much for the useful tips.
I'll try to work harder on my hook sentence.

I think your essay is very good, just amend a little to achieve the higher score in TOEFL test. Pay attention to your conjunction (or won't use behind comma "."-> otherwise). Other tips Holt have already given you. Change by her advice, you will easier get approximate 25+