Freshman 15?
Being sent off to college for the first time comes with a lot of expected and unexpected changes. Generous meal plans, yay! Binge drinking, woohoo! Condo-style dorm rooms, I’ll take one! More stress, ummm, do I have to?? With all of these changes, welcome or unwelcome, one of the first horizons to expand in college is the waistline.
Unfortunately, if rapid weight gain in the fun years of early adulthood isn’t bad enough, it is also correlated with obesity later in life. In short, these are formative years in more ways than we think. But does providence predestine us for the plumping from the “freshman 15”? According to a recent study, the answer is no.
First, we don’t all gain 15. In fact, the average weight gain upon entry to college is only seven pounds. Seven! Good news, right? Well, not exactly. Seven pounds of weight gain in one calendar year is still SEVEN times what would be considered a healthy weight gain. And remember that whole “correlated with obesity later in life” thing? Yeah. So, before we start celebrating that 15 pounds of gain isn’t the destination, we need to remember that seven is still way too much.
So, with all that in mind, the advice for new coeds is the same for anyone going through a major life transition. Keep to a plan, don’t eat whatever, whenever. Keep your stress in check, maybe even reduce it with a great new yoga class at the college rec center. Don’t slack on sleep. Sleep is the key to restoring your body, keeping cravings at bay, and broadening your horizons where you want them broadest: in your brain.
Rosenbloom C. (2016, Sep 6). You don’t have to gain the ‘freshman 15’ — or even the freshman seven. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/you-dont-have-to-gain-the-freshman-15–or-even-the-freshman-seven/2016/09/01/ec20bf72-6ebf-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html
Vadeboncoeur, C., Townsend, N., & Foster, C. (2015). A meta-analysis of weight gain in first year university students: is freshman 15 a myth? BMC Obesity, 2, 22. http://doi.org/10.1186/s40608-015-0051-7
Well that’s good that it’s the Freshman Seven instead of the Freshman Fifteen, but I do agree that even seven pounds is too much. It can build up over time, especially given many newly minted graduates will probably be working in sedentary environments. I think one main contributor to the Freshman Seven is transitioning from a life that was rather structured to a life in which at first seems not structured at all. This especially the case if you went to high school bringing your lunch as opposed to eating at the school cafeteria. For me I pretty much brought the same thing as lunch every day.
I know when I was a freshman, they had all of these “First Year Experience” programs, but one of the things they failed to cover is how to make healthy decisions once making the transition to being a college student. I don’t know if UGA has this kind of programming, but it would have been helpful to know even basic things about the rec center and the classes they have. While I was interested in using the rec center when I was a freshman, I really didn’t start using it until I was a senior. I will say that I was rather impressed with what I saw with Bolton Dining Hall; I felt like I received a lot of information about which food is healthier options and which ones were not. It would have been helpful to have this kind of signage when I was a freshman.
While 7 pounds is under half of 15, that is still almost a pound per month when we look at school time, which is still a big amount. While there are smart reminders of what to do, I do not believe this is enough. With freedom, people are going to do what they want, and it would take much more than a simple strategy to make people truly follow what is written.
While we are supposed to be all about health, I believe one of the best ways to learn throughout life is the hard way. If people have to initially gain weight when they enter college in order to best learn how they do not want to be then so be it. Sometimes it takes that to learn rather than just being told nicely what to do. Although weight gain is less now in year one, the most important thing is that kids learn how to manage themselves entering adulthood. If there could be an entrance to college program run by college upperclassmen or recently graduated students then I think it might help college students learn the easy way. But if the hard way is what it takes to learn, then so be it. Education is what is most important.