How to Avoid the “Freshman 15″ Weight Gain: Keep Your Distance From Food. Literally.
It’s Going to be Very Tempting to Pig Out. The Trick is to Not Make It Very Convenient as Well.
Autumn is nearly upon us, which means that school will soon be starting, which in turn means that a significant percentage of American adolescents are staring down the barrel of the dreaded “freshman fifteen” — the amount of pounds that conventional wisdom says the typical new college student is liable to gain during his or her first year away at college.
How to avoid this cliché and maintain a healthy weight has become a matter of some concern to freshmen and their parents alike. Happily for them, some researchers at Marquette University studied the eating habits of first-year students at seven dormitories and came up a simple rule that could be of some aid in staying trim, a rule that rather surprised the researchers, but probably shouldn’t have.
The rule: The more distance between your dorm room and a kitchen, the better.
They came to this conclusion after taking freshmen from the seven different dorms, four of which had dining halls onsite, and monitoring their weight and activities. What they found at the end of the study was that female students in dorms with dining facilities weighed nearly two pounds more than those living in dorms without dining halls.
So it’s just that simple, live in a dorm with no dining hall, right? Well, maybe not. It seems that those in the dining hall dorms also exercised 1.5 fewer times per week on average than those in the non-dining dorms. Accordingly, some observers suggest that the rule might actually be: The closer your dorm room is to a gym, the better.
They reason that (1) studies show that the great majority of people who regularly work out at fitness facilities live just a short distance from those facilities, and (2) if proximity to food is so pivotal, why didn’t they gain 15 pounds per year all through high school, when the food was just down the hall from their room?
Evidently the Marquette study did not record the distance from the various dorms to the school gym and/or fitness center, so further study will be needed to nail down the relative impact of dining halls and exercise facilities. In the meantime, to the standard weight-control advice given to new college students — don’t snack out of boredom or hang out with students who do, use study breaks as exercise breaks, weigh yourself regularly — we are probably safe in adding this: Try for a dorm room that is at least several minutes closer on foot to an exercise facility than it is to a food source.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):
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