Freshman 15
Guide to Eating Your Way Through College
By Amy Yang
Published by Second Sight Inc. at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Second Sight Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author except for brief quotations for articles and reviews.
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Chapter 1:
In Which You Learn a Thing or Two to Begin With
So you have made it! You’ve gotten through high school and you are in college now. Freshman 15? What the heck is that? To be sure, it’s your first year, and you are on your own – in a sense – for the first time in your life… and well… “The Freshman 15” is not part of your vocabulary… Yet!
They say that with freedom comes responsibility. And you say: freedom is good, but responsibility? Give me a break! You are young and you’d rather be careless – oops, carefree. This is your time, and it’s youth-time (old age will never come anyway, right? – well, not exactly).
Okay, let’s get down to the bare facts (as in looking at yourself in the mirror in your birthday suit: see something you don’t like? Not yet, but watch out).
In any case, they say (yes, there are many things that “they say”) that you are what you eat. And, no, that doesn’t mean that if you eat nothing but pizza, you’ll turn into a big fat pizza pie with tomato sauce and pepperoni and cheese on top. But your body is, among other things, a food-guzzling “machine.” You need to eat to stay alive. No getting around that bare fact.
But they also say nasty things, like “whatever you like is either immoral or illegal or fattening.” Let’s skip the first two (for now – you’ll probably take a course in ethics later anyway). Let’s just zero in on “fattening.” It’s usually a case of too much of a good thing. Where “good thing” is itself a potentially problematic concept. You think that pizza is a good thing. So are burgers and fries. And potato chips, too. And candy bars, for that matter. These are all good foods – that is to say, these are all foods that are good to eat. These are the foods (and then some) that you really like – and have liked all your life, for all intents and purposes.
Are these really good foods? There are good (read: healthy) ingredients in most of them: tomato sauce and mushrooms (if you like your pizza with mushrooms – low in calories, rich in nutrients). Tomato sauce is actually better for you than raw tomatoes (lycopene, an antioxidant, is more easily absorbed by your body in cooked form). Some red meat is also good for you (with another “ugly word,” though: moderation), and potatoes are vegetables, right? Why should frying and salting them make them bad? (They say, though, that that’s the case against them.) The same fate befalls potato chips: there goes the frying and the salting thing again. Candy? Dark chocolate is good for you (one of the good things “they say”). Not all candy is made of it – alas! And its bitter, too, right?
It’s only partly what you eat when you find yourself in college that’s the problem (we haven’t mentioned the problem yet, have we?) – the other part is the hours you start keeping: sleeping in (on mornings when you don’t have an “evil” early class), staying up late. Partying and – gulp – drinking (are you over 21?). Then there are all those hours devoted to studying – hitting the books. But today, there is the Internet as well. And cell phones and smart phones, not to speak of laptops. Professors use them, too. And a lot of communication – official or not – takes place with these technological gadgets that your parents or grandparents knew nothing of (for them the idea would have sounded like so much science fiction just a couple of generations ago).
So, let’s face it: you are not really in a 9-to-5 situation here. You don’t really divide your days into reasonable eight-hour periods: eight hours of shuteye and eight hours of “work” and eight hours of play (leisure time). And the middle part, the “work” part, is for classes and studying, combined. But your days don’t exactly break down into those units, do they? At times you sleep less and party more and may even skip some classes (hoping that class cuts will not hurt your grades too much). So things aren’t actually played out on a “normal” (read: reasonable) schedule. You are all over the place. And your mealtimes begin to show signs of “wear and tear”). The Freshman 15 is beginning to rear it’s ugly head… or should I say “butt” :-)
Cold pizza for breakfast? Yes, sure. Potato chips and a Hershey bar (with almonds) for lunch? You bet. And dinner is the good old burger and fries, washed down with a soft drink (no, not of the diet variety). But that’s not exactly how the day winds down: there is some party going on here and there all the time, right? And here you’ll consume more potato chips and more questionable finger foods – and even perhaps (gulp) beer, if not something worse. And by now, if you are underage, we are also up against the illegal if not the immoral.
Long story short: what you are going to learn as you progress your days through that first or second semester of your first year in college is that the scale begins to confirm what the mirror may have already told you: you are not looking as skinny as you used to look when it all started, when you so gleefully moved into the dorm and made friends with your roommate – and your courses and the whole idea of “I am in college now.” This (the weight gain) is not what you bargained for. In fact, you haven’t really bargained for anything at all – except to be a college student, with all that that entails and/or implies.
Chapter 2:
In Which You Learn That Life Is Not a Bed of Roses
You have heard the old saying (a cliché for many people), “I never promised you a rose garden.” The question is, just who is saying that to whom? And why? Let’s say that in this case it’s the admission committee that sent you that letter of acceptance that’s the culprit. What they didn’t say when they said “congratulations” etc., is that weight gain is the inevitable consequence of your first year in college (and the gain isn’t going to go away any time soon, unless you change your ways – and changing your ways isn’t going to come up roses, either).