I’m an Omnivore

Many people claim it’s a myth, but there is obviously something going on here for this myth to be so popular. I certainly didn’t stay in shape during my freshman year or my sophomore year for that matter. Stress, work, and projects can take their toll on students, but why is weight gain such a common thing in an age group that should be at its physical peak?

I think the real reasons are just bad habits. Bad habits made worse by friends with equally bad habits.

1. The dining hall.

You get to college and you realize, ‘hey, this food doesn’t totally suck!’ Now, by the third year or so (if you’re still eating at a dining hall), this shock starts to wear off and you just begin loathing the food. However, during freshman year, the dining hall doesn’t seem so bad. It’s like a night and day difference from high school. There are plenty of choices, junk food, fried food, and lots of beverages. The biggest thing is that you can eat as much you want during every single meal. It is actually one of the better options available to you, but there is a big problem with it: you can eat as much you want during every single meal. This was difficult for me to deal with because I didn’t have a very good sense of how much to eat. I just ate until it was time to go.

2. Epic meals.

This is another problem that arises from the dining hall. Your friends might have slightly conflicting class schedules. No big deal, right? You’ll just space the dinner out to include everyone. Even if that’s not an issue, the crowd might just hang around chatting. So what could be a 15 minute meal turns into a 2 hour food eating contest. Combining studying and eating can cause this to happen too. I knew some people with limited amounts of meals that would come in during lunch and stay several hours into dinner. It’s definitely not good if you don’t put down the fork.

3. Collegiate hilarity and Groupthink.

College is a blast and it’s also hilarious. Really, I found myself laughing a lot and creating a lot of long running inside jokes. I was surrounded by a group of friends from high school and a few new friends. Collectively, we have a very quirky, obscure sense of humor. The jokes we made were only as good as the frequency at which we brought them up; kind of like a comedian that makes a joke that references something he’s already said. And believe it or not, our eating habits were strongly influenced by these weird inside jokes we created. These are some of the most ridiculous:

• Rectangular pizza. This little piece of high school nostalgia somehow sneaked its way into our dining hall. It was so rare that tradition required each person consume at least 2-3 pizzas whenever it arrived and conversely people would lie about the existence of rectangular pizza when it wasn’t there.
• Quadruple burgers. You heard right. Our group had an arm’s race of sorts when we found out the short order cooks at the dining hall would make burgers with multiple patties.
• PACKED TO THE MAX. A friend and I would always get a Snicker’s bar that apparently was PACKED TO THE MAX with some sort of nut before a certain class. I’m not sure it was even that great, but the slogan was great.
• Hot ‘n Readys. A cholesterol-laden, heart attack-inducing line of convenience store sandwiches. The fact that they were so bad is pretty much the only reason we kept eating them.

The problem with these jokes is that you keep falling into this routine even after you have no real reason to do so. After a while, I would eat all of these things more out of habit and comical effect than out of enjoyment. I really don’t want to use the word peer pressure because that’s stupid, but I’m not sure what a better term would be. Perhaps Groupthink.

4. All nighters.

Some people pull more all nighters than others. During my third semester, I pulled one at least once a week to finish a 15 page lab report that was always due at 8 a.m. the following morning. I strolled into that lab every week with no sleep and struggled to keep my eyes open for several seconds. Luckily, my lab partner and I used teamwork: we would just have to push each other throughout the lab to stay awake.

Of course this type of activity is catastrophe on your body, but it got worse. In order to stay up, we usually drank a lot of soda and energy drinks. We supplemented that with candy and lots of it. I was an RA at the time, so I had plenty of money to blow on sugar. I’m not sure all nighters can always be avoided, but you certainly don’t have to make a bad time worse. Coffee works wonders.

5. Procrastination.

You might think this is the same as #4, but it’s not. The simple act of procrastination is terrible on your health. There are two reasons. Let me explain. The first is that procrastination is stressful. Procrastination is effective, but horribly inefficient. You will get your stuff done after wasting enough time, but what have you gained? The stress of waiting until the last minute isn’t good. Stress is after all one of the contributing factors to obesity.

The second reason is less obvious. I’m reading a book on procrastination right now. One of the main focuses of the book is creating “guilt-free play” in your life. What people usually do when they procrastinate isn’t always the thing they like to do the most. They don’t feel like they deserve to do something fun. Instead they will simply waste time. For me, I will usually surf the web while procrastinating. Surfing the web isn’t that rewarding. It’s just instant gratification. You lie to yourself by saying “I’m not putting off this work. I’m just surfing on the web for a few minutes.”

What would be much more rewarding, if you don’t feel like doing the work at the moment, is consciously deciding to go do something you enjoy a lot more. And often, this could be something physical or something stress relieving. So what I’m saying is procrastination replaces these enjoyable, healthy activities with ones that are neither.

6. Beer. Wine. Liquor. Beer.

It’s college. This one is obvious, but you may not know a few things here. I used to think that liquor was somehow void of calories. It turns out that a shot of 80-proof alcohol is about 100 calories. A beer is about 150. So depending on your love of libations, you could easily knock back 1000-1500 calories in one night, which is pretty much the equivalent of several meals.

7. The dorm room pantry.

I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have their dorm room loaded with at least one of the following: ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, soda, chocolate milk, frozen pizzas, burritos, or cookies. Generally, the worst kinds of foods are also the ones that meet two criteria that college students look for: incredibly cheap price and long shelf-life. These foods are the most processed. They have the most added sugar and sodium. I don’t want to even think about how bad the 4/$1 burritos were that I used to eat.

8. Convenience stores, vending machines, and free food.

The convenient stores located all across campus were indeed convenient, but they usually had very little healthy food. It was the same kind of food I just talked about. Processed, sugary, salty, and high in fat. Then there are vending machines, which are sometimes the only place to find food if you don’t already have it.

Throughout the year, but most often during the beginning of a semester, there would be tons of food given away for free. Events that had free food also had a pretty typical selection: soda and pizza. For a person that doesn’t eat any dairy right now, you can imagine how I felt about the nutritional quality of pizza. Some people rely on these many free food events to supplement their normal eating, but we would often eat a dinner that was free and head to the dining hall too.

9. I’m already walking to class!

During my freshman year, I was assigned to a dorm that I didn’t choose. It was one of the furthest dorms away from classes and dining halls. I ended up falling in love with that dorm, but I always walked quite a bit to class. This is a good thing no doubt. However, when you walk to class everyday, you may feel like you don’t need to exercise. The truth is that walking a few minutes a day didn’t even come close to offsetting the extra calories I was consuming. With any sort of exercise, you are going to get less and less value out of it as your body becomes conditioned to doing it. There are plenty of opportunities to get valuable exercise, but they will elude people that think they don’t need to exercise, which brings me to my final point.

10. Cluelessness.

College students pay for a lot in fees. They pay for a lot of services that they will never utilize. One of the most disturbing things is that many freshmen know nothing about their own gymnasium. Here’s a thought. The gymnasium at your college is probably going to be one of the cheapest (since your marginal cost is zero), highest quality, most accessible (always was less than a five minute walk for me) fitness centers that will ever be available to you. And yet so many students will squander this opportunity out of fear, apathy, or laziness. Many students will become acquainted with their gym when they have their first physical education class, but it will usually be far too late to avoid the freshman fifteen.

None of this has to take place, but you’ve got to stand up against bad habits and routines. You have to make the most out of the transition into college. And it’s never too late to start actually caring about your body. I’ll discuss ways that you can avoid the freshman fifteen and the sophomore, junior, and senior fifteen in a later post.