Saturday, October 07, 2006
Carry That Weight
Seize the Weight
I SURVIVED the freshman 15.
Technically, the extra pounds arrived the summer before my freshman year, when I went to Paris on one of those exchange programs where you’re supposed to submerge yourself in a captivating new culture but end up hanging out exclusively with other loud, gauche Americans, going to clubs, smoking cigarettes and barely learning to order coffee in the native tongue.
And, fine, the 15 were more along the lines of seven. But they were there. The once-roomy Oxford shirt I’d worn throughout high school began to yawn rudely between buttons. Every night after dinner, I felt a strange, overpowering urge to unfasten the top button of my jeans.
When I made it home at the end of the summer, my mom studied the photos from my trip, but instead of commenting on the muffin top bulging over my belt loops, she said I’d never looked happier. Shocked, I scrutinized my beaming face, pink and puffy as a macaroon.
And then it dawned on me: A little weight gain when you’ve been downing croissants and crepes and dancing all night in discos with male models who spoke brittle English wasn’t so bad. No, that mysterious, feared affliction known as the freshman 15 was entirely misunderstood — menacing in reputation, but in reality? Marvelous.
Sadly, few have gotten the memo. This back-to-school season, there’s been an outbreak of diet books aimed at avoiding the freshman 15.
Written by dieticians and nutritionists, a few by college students themselves, these books detail the ways in which any diligent undergrad can negotiate — along with heavy course loads, freaky roommates and dorm rooms no bigger than outhouses — portion size, fat intake and triweekly exercise programs, not to mention midnight cravings for pizza, pasta, Twinkies and Tab.
As helpful as such guides are meant to be, they’re nothing but buzz kill, a chafe, strictly for the birds. Forget the most obvious problem with collegiate calorie counting, that studying Kierkegaard or Conrad after a dinner of seitan and soy chips would render even robust stomachs seasick, sometimes outright ill. And I won’t harp on the clear link between vigorous salad consumption and sulkiness.
No, it’s that step-by-step, nitpicky dieting — any kind of strangling self-denial — goes against the very essence of the university experience.
College is a time for excess, for experimentation. It is four fleeting years of free-spirited indulgence in the form of metaphysics classes, a cappella ensembles, Gaelic Women’s Poetry or Intro to Interpretive Dance. Maybe you were a geek in high school — in college, you have carte blanche to go Goth. Always thought you were a jock who could never speak a foreign language? Meet a French girl at a frat party; soon you’re specializing in Sartre.
Time — she stops for no one. A student has eight semesters to fight not for gangplank abs or the loss of a dress size, but for a life experience that defies manuals, handbooks and how-to’s. Be baffled, heart-broken, a fool, fall flat, find out you (and, amazingly, your parents) never really had a clue.
This could very well lead you to Nietzsche, pizza and the Lipinski twins at 4 a.m. A rowdy incident involving cookie dough, snow angels, five townies and Lynyrd Skynyrd is also not out of the question. Neither are doughnuts and “Lonesome Dove.”
If you gain a little gut while studying Goethe, it will be fine. Post-graduation, there’ll be plenty of time for self-restraint and discipline, piling up on steamed spinach, ignoring starch. Corporate America, with its cubicles, wan lighting and the je ne sais quoi of a poultry farm, demands responsibility, conscientiousness and sober adherence to rules and tasks.
After a grueling year number-crunching for a boss who knows mortgage-backed securities but has never heard of Montmartre, the spontaneous all-night study session you once held in your dorm room sophomore year (beer, Byron and buffalo wings) will seem like a far-off, childhood dream.
Don’t waste it. Use that finite period to live on your own terms, let go. Take Emily Dickinson’s words to heart: “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” (This means you’ll have few occasions for weighing yourself or whaling on your pecs.) Go for a bike ride. Ask out a cute guy. Try a tutorial on black holes. Or tai chi.
My freshman 15 are long gone. I lost half of them pounding the pavement as an entry-level consultant, moonlighting as an actress in shoestring musicals about the World Wrestling Federation and Hasidic Jews. The rest vanished after I bought a pair of crystal-encrusted Manolos and had to subsist on Melba toast and sardines for a few months in order to pay my rent. Those extra pounds were like unsightly but astounding lovers; I didn’t quite realize how great I had it — not until they were gone.
So trust me, you won’t have the cushioning of college forever. Until it’s all over — and you’re living with your parents, facing $20,000 in student loans — eat cake.
15 Pounds: Part of Freshman Meal Plan?
AT Terra Ve, a vegetarian cafeteria at Purchase College in Westchester County, N.Y., the bacon pizza is vegan, the Asian rice is low fat, and a big poster next to the French fry station extols the virtues of zero trans fat soy oil.
“It was kind of healthy and surprisingly good,” said Daniel Abillama, 19, a freshman from Southampton, N.Y., of the stuffed broccoli pizza he had for lunch last Monday. “Luckily, we are too poor for dessert.”
Justin Hoffman of Manorville, N.Y., who was also only three days into his college career at Purchase College, part of the State University of New York, was also thinking about the inches that college dining might add to his waistline.
“I am worried because 15 pounds would show on me,” said Mr. Hoffman, 17. “That’s why I haven’t eaten much in the last couple of days.”
At this time of year, as students move into dorm rooms laden with comforters from Target, stacking shelves from Ikea, iPods and PowerBooks, they also take with them a host of worries about making friends, getting good grades and living on their own. But, for many, a foremost concern is what they will eat and whether they will experience the dreaded double-digit weight gain known as the “freshman 15.”
One of the earliest references to this affliction appeared in The Chicago Tribune in 1985, and it has since become a standard part of college lore, especially among young women. What is college, after all, but unlimited access to all-you-can-eat buffet-style dining halls with prepaid meal cards, late-night partying or studying fueled by high-fat snacks, and gossip sessions with roommates served up with a side of ice cream?
But the freshman 15 may turn out to be the Loch Ness monster of campus life — a much-reported phenomenon with little documentation behind it.
College weight fluctuation is a relatively new field of study. And because most of the published research on the topic involves only small groups of students on individual campuses, researchers do not know what percentage of the college population experiences weight changes, or even whether such changes are temporary or lead to long-term health consequences, said Daniel J. Hoffman, an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J..
“The ‘freshman 15’ is a catchy phrase,” Dr. Hoffman said. “Nobody would pay attention to the ‘freshman 5,’ and the ‘freshman 50’ is unrealistic.” But in a study of weight and body fat changes among 67 Rutgers freshmen, published last month in The Journal of American College Health, Dr. Hoffman found that 18 students lost weight, while 49 students gained an average of 7 pounds each. “Nobody gained 15 pounds.”
This has not stopped students from thinking about it.
“I guess some people go overboard with junk food,” said Nina Marie, 17, a Purchase freshman from Pelham, N.Y., who plans to work out six days a week as a member of the tennis team. “But I already know you shouldn’t eat in your dorm, you don’t snack, and you can’t eat burgers and fries every day,” she added, even as she downed a cheeseburger and fries.
But Ms. Marie had the right idea, some experts said. College should be about making wise choices and developing healthy eating habits. And that is where Daphne Oz, a junior at Princeton from Cliffside Park, N.J., comes in.
To help her peers navigate the Circean lures of college dining halls and late-night study breaks, Ms. Oz has written a book, “The Dorm Room Diet” (Newmarket Press), to be released on Sept. 6. The easy-to-read guide has a simple philosophy behind it: If students know nutrition basics, they will make healthier food choices.
Ms. Oz, 20, is the first to admit that she has no credentials in health or nutrition; her major is Near Eastern studies.
Her qualifications include the fact that her father is Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, a cardiac surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, who has taken her into his operating room to show her the fat-clogged arteries of his patients. And at the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, N.J., she wrote a high school research paper on teenage nutrition and lobbied for healthier cafeteria food, she said.
But what Ms. Oz lacks in credentials, she makes up for with a transformational story of a self-described former chubby girl made cute by laying off the cookie dough and laying on the cardio. While some of her classmates pigged out, she lost 10 pounds during her freshman year, she said. She did it by relying on vegetarian entrees and salads at her dining hall, snacking on grapes, nuts, baby carrots and semisweet chocolate bits, and eating high-fat foods and sweets only occasionally.
Ms. Oz’s own metamorphosis — from an unconscious consumer of white bread, bagels and “huge plates of pasta” to an alert eater who views food purely as fuel — forms the backbone of the book.
“If I give you the right information, and if I tell you my story as important, then anyone can make the transformation,” Ms. Oz said.
Her tips include avoiding sugar cereals and fried food; stocking dorm refrigerators with bite-size goodies like strawberries and baby carrots instead of Diet Coke and ice cream; filling up on fruit and water before attending parties; and preparing for study sessions by brown-bagging snacks like pears and soy crisps so that the midnight munchies won’t propel you to a vending machine.
“If I can get to you now, I can help you create healthy habits that will last the rest of your life,” Ms. Oz said.
For all its well-intentioned talk of good eating habits, however, the book does occasionally equate fat not only with unhealthiness but also with unattractiveness. The introduction, for example, starts off with a fable about a hypothetical student at “Fat U.,” whose chronic reliance on junk food results in a face full of dark circles, puffy eyes, zits and a belly “hanging over the pants that used to be your ‘fat jeans.’ ” Meanwhile a student at an imaginary “Fit U.,” who forgoes pizza and candy bars, has wide eyes, “not a blemish in sight,” and no trouble getting dressed in the morning because every outfit looks great.
“Sometimes with young people you have to play on their vanity,” said Ms. Oz, who described “The Dorm Room Diet” as a healthy eating plan and not an ode to thinness.
But Melody A. Graham, a professor of psychology at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said that encouraging dieting could compound student anxiety. In a study of 44 freshmen on her campus, Dr. Graham found that those who started the year concerned about gaining weight were more likely to have negative body images and to overestimate their weight gain at the end of the year.
According to her study, “Freshman 15: Valid Theory or Harmful Myth?” published in 2002 in The Journal of American College Health, 26 of the students gained an average of 4.6 pounds, 16 students lost weight, and 2 students maintained their weight.
“There is a high correlation between concern over the mythical freshman 15 and poor body image at the end of the year,” Dr. Graham said.
Still, even if 15 is a mythical number, college weight gain could present a significant health issue, said Dr. Hoffman of Rutgers. All it took for the freshmen in his study to gain seven pounds over two semesters was about 112 extra calories a day, he said.
“That’s one commercial soda or half of a commercial cookie a day, or 10 minutes less of exercise,” Dr. Hoffman said.
And a few students do gain more than 15 pounds. Zoe Hall, Ms. Oz’s best friend from childhood, gained 20 pounds during her first year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville because her class schedule conflicted with the opening hours of the university dining hall and she subsisted mostly on candy, frosted animal crackers, bagels and also late-night pizza delivered to her dorm room, she said.
“It’s a gradual weight gain that you only realize when your clothes don’t fit any more,” said Ms. Hall, 19, from Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Since she transferred last year to New York University where she eats at make-your-own-salad places, she has lost weight, she said.
Many campuses are already attuned to the idea that college eating can be habit forming. Purchase College, for example, where 35 percent of students identified themselves in a survey as vegetarians, has vegetarian options at each of its three cafeterias.
Chartwells Dining Services, which provides the food services at 230 college campuses, including Purchase, also maintains a Web site (dineoncampus.com/purchase/index.cfm, for example) that lists the calorie and fat content of hundreds of foods, including McDonald’s hamburgers and Good Seasons Italian salad dressing. The site also helps students calculate their body mass index and the number of calories they naturally burn each day (dineoncampus.com/purchase/?cmd=Wellness).
Andrew Parker, a junior from Massapequa, N.Y., said he lost 20 pounds since coming to Purchase. In high school, he ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast, Chinese food or pizza for lunch, and ice cream after dinner, he said. Last Monday, Mr. Parker, a music performance major who plays the oboe, was lunching on a chicken sandwich and fruit salad.
“I have seen a lot of people coming home from freshman year who looked like they had gained more than 15 pounds,” Mr. Parker said. “I am eating a lot healthier.”###
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