The “Freshman 15″

A post on one of the Yahoo! health blogs made me think of this, and given how this time of the year seems to be appropriate for such a topic, I decided to link to it here.

The post itself is about the famous “freshman 15″, and what can be done to prevent them from plaguing a young student’s life.

Many nutrition experts and psychologists hypothesize that it is the change in environment and the stress of a new beginning that causes the typical college freshman to gain extra pounds. As students embark on a new phase of their lives, many eat to cope with the stress of change or loneliness. Often, college students are making meals or choosing foods independently for the first time in their lives. If they live in the college dormitory, they have a wide variety of foods to select from that may be higher in calories and fat than the foods they typically consumed living at home. In addition, college social events usually center around food. I clearly remember sitting in my dorm cafeteria for 2 or 3 hours on a Saturday morning socializing with my peers. Instead of eating only one meal, we would start with breakfast, graze for the duration of our socializing, and finish with lunch. Food also makes an appearance after late-night parties, as part of a study session, or simply to break the monotony.

Now, the thing is, we don’t really use this expression, or a similar one, in France, and I’m not sure that it really happens very often. Is it more of a US thing, is it common here as well and I simply didn’t hear of it much? One thing is sure: the complete change of environment and new pressures put on a student are indeed factors that can trigger eating more and/or in a worse way.

I know that in my specific case, I didn’t gain on weight–instead, I lost 16 pounds in less than one semester, due precisely to the food put at our disposal by college structures. The secret? I’m not sure there’s one. I didn’t have money to buy junk food. College restaurants were the cheapest places where I could have a complete meal (actually, it was the more balanced diet I had been on in many years). The dorm I was living in was 20 minutes by foot from my school, and no bus was going there: I was bound to walk at least 40 minutes every day. All of this combined sure can help one overweight little woman, can’t it?

And this is one thing I’d really like to advise students: even if it’s hard to properly choose foods or resist the temptations in the dorms, one thing to do is to try to keep a good dose of exercise going. Walk or bike to class if you can (if it’s half a hour by car from where you live, of course, it’s another problem). Most of all, have a look at the facilities offered by your university. Here, for a meager 10$ a year, I could practice every sport for which they had teachers. Fencing, swimming, basket-ball, volley-ball…: they had it all, and it was a blast that halped me lose weight *and* kept me infused with energy to attend my cramming classes. All good advantages, and if you live close to the campus, you won’t even waste much time going there.