Fat-free frozen yogurt. Rum and Diet Coke. Gummi Bears. Hot game-day pretzels with mustard. Salad bars. Fat-free Pokey Sticks (buttery, cheesy gooey bread sticks, minus the butter and cheese). These are culinary inventions adopted by university neophytes in an attempt to dodge the Freshman 15, that infamous weight gain joked about in college cafeterias across the country.
The legend transcends state borders and generational divides, looming large over thousands of freshmen. As these young college students unpack their suitcases, they wonder if they’ll pack on the pounds.
While Lesley Fragale of Brighton, Wis., prepared for college, the slim 5-foot-2 18-year-old was teased by friends and family: “Wait until Lesley comes home. She’ll be big and fat.”
She had witnessed older girls returning home for winter vacation with a little extra insulation. So when Fragale arrived at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this fall, she went armed with a plan to avoid becoming a statistic. At the same time, she refuses to obsess over every morsel.
“A lot of the girls watch every single thing they eat,” she said. “I’ve decided I’d rather enjoy food than worry about the calories.” Fragale does indulge in junk food, relying on her fast metabolism to pick up the slack. So far, she hasn’t gained a pound.
According to Diane Quagliani, a Chicago-area registered dietitian and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, the concept of the Freshman 15 not only exists, it’s also growing.
“I remember a decade ago, it was called the Freshman 10, ” she said. “The notion that college freshmen can put on a few pounds has been around for a long time.”
Of course, this is not to say that every college rookie is destined to gain weight, Quagliani added. But she did outline three key catalysts behind the flab, including serious health issues.
First, the transition from high school to college can induce some jarring changes in dietary routine. At home, parents more or less set nutritional standards, deciding what to keep in the kitchen and what to prepare for meals. But the limitless choices of the dormitory cafeteria environment can easily override those many years of hard work.
“It can be somewhat dazzling to see all those options, day after day,” Quagliani said. “But the thing is, just because you can have dessert at lunch and dinner doesn’t mean that you should.”
Indeed, at DePaul University, “I’ve seen lunch trays with a slice of pizza, some French fries, some macaroni, cookies, a brownie and a salad,” recounted Kelly Myers, marketing director for Chartwells Dining Services, the university’s food vendor.
To help steer new students toward a more healthful approach, Myers said, her freshmen are offered items such as prewrapped turkey sandwiches on wheat bread, fiber-rich cereal bars and smoothies spiked with ginseng or protein powder. Even prepackaged sushi is available. Most DePaul facilities are run on a retail basis, which Myers said may deter some freshmen from that all-you-can-eat mentality.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Statesider dorm, freshman Robyn Kaplan navigates her unlimited-meals-per-week eating plan by avoiding overly greasy foods. Instead, she often opts for healthy items such as egg-white omelets.
Tuning out the facts
“Teenagers don’t really pay attention to nutritional facts,” the 18-year-old Skokie native said. “But once you get to college, you’re on your own. Here, everyone’s concerned about it.”
The second reason Quagliani provided for the Freshman 15 fear: a dearth of physical activity. Although many students were active in high school sports and athletic teams, the academic intensity of college life can squeeze out leisure time. Hours spent on the basketball court or track are displaced by hours spent sitting in lecture hall and the library.
To counteract school-induced spread, Quagliani suggests that students take advantage of university fitness centers and aerobics classes. Another easy tip is to opt for stairs over elevators and to walk to and from class when possible.
“Any opportunity for movement is going to help you burn calories,” she said. Joining an athletic team would prove particularly beneficial, as would any extracurricular club involving physical activity. Kaplan, for example, plays trumpet in the UW marching band, an extremely physically demanding role that calls for hours of practice per day.
Camaraderie and calories
Quagliani’s third proposed explanation for freshman weight gain involves the social aspect of college eating. New to college life, freshmen struggle to ingratiate themselves into a fresh set of social circles.
“So much of our celebrating and fun revolves around eating,” she said. “There’s a sort of camaraderie involved in ordering late-night pizza.”
At UW-Madison, Fragale said, “someone might order bread sticks and ask, `Do you wanna go in on it?’ and a lot of people do, to kind of get involved.”
Meyers has observed this at DePaul, where “late-night studying leads to late-night snacking. They’ll order pizza or hit the vending machines in the dorms.”
Another common practice on campus is to advertise lectures or groups with lures of free submarine sandwiches or pizza. Freshmen might also find themselves lingering in the dorm cafeteria, caught up in conversation or debate. This places students at risk for overeating, as they search to occupy their hands with something.
Weighing the evidence
“If people are going back for seconds,” Quagliani said, “there could be a tendency to go back yourself.” She suggested listening to one’s “fullness gauge” and distinguishing thirst from hunger.
But how much of this 13th-grade gluttony is grounded in fact, and how much is anecdotal? According to Janelle Walter, professor of family and consumer sciences at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, “the Freshman 15 has never been proven. It’s much like the sugar and hyperactivity debate,” which to say, it’s a popular myth but not validated by research.
Walter followed 75 freshmen throughout the year and found that no one gained a significant amount of weight except those males who were still developing, which is to say, many of them.
“Not all weight gain is bad,” Walter said. “Most people think, `What I weighed when I reached my current height, that’s what I should weigh for the rest of my life.'”
Yet young men and women continue to build muscle and bone throughout their 20s.
Not always a bad thing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumnus Adam Kahan, 25, said he wasn’t particularly worried about the Freshman 15 as he prepared for college. In fact, “I thought, `If I go in and gain 15 pounds, great!'”
At 6 foot 3 and 170 pounds, Kahan said, he sometimes thought that, as a man, his body-image concerns were not taken as seriously as those of the young women around him.
“Most people want to be attractive in college,” he said, “but the focus for women tends to be how thin and toned they can be, and for men, how bulky and cut they can be.”
At the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Wellness Center, students and staff have access to free nutritional counseling by licensed and registered dietitian Bindi Desai. Desai said the most common freshman complaint is a lack of healthy eating choices on a campus saturated with fast-food restaurants such as Taco Bell, Wendy’s and Sbarro.
Meal irregularity poses a different sort of challenge for students, Desai said, many of whom forgo meals to save time or salvage calories.
“They think, `I didn’t eat all day, so it’s OK for me to have pizza and a milkshake for dinner.’ But sometimes it’s better to eat more healthy calories than less unhealthy calories.”
Too little, then too much
Skipping breakfast not only backfires on your stomach but on your mental health as well. The body essentially has been deprived of fuel throughout the night, contributing to sluggishness, low energy and an inability to concentrate. Adding insult to injury, the ensuing semi-starved state leaves students vulnerable to overeating later on.
“Skipping breakfast causes chaotic eating,” Quagliani said. “You walk into the cafeteria and caution just gets thrown to the wind.”
For a more satisfying solution, she recommended a combination of complex carbohydrates, some protein and a little fat; whole-wheat toast with peanut butter, a glass of milk and a piece of fruit, for instance.
For the time-crunched, try some fruit and low-fat yogurt or, in a pinch, even a slice of leftover cheese pizza, Quagliani said. Plus, make use of that dorm-room fridge and keep healthy snacks such as yogurt and baby carrots on hand, or consider low-fat microwave popcorn.
Two more risks for college rookies (the former legal, the latter not): vegetarianism and beer.
Fat-laden vegetarians
“A lot of college students think that as soon as they get into college, if they go vegetarian, it’s healthy,” Myers said. “But they might not be well-educated.”
The result is a diet gooey with fat-laden cheese and low in complete protein–macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese, cheese pizza. To help, DePaul students are offered lower-fat meatless entrees such as lentil stew, plus nutrition literature on vegetarianism, eating disorders, the food pyramid and drinking.
Alcohol is a calorie giant devoid of nutritional merit. Stressing the fact that college freshmen are legally disqualified from imbibing in the first place, Quagliani explained that calories from alcohol add up as quickly as calories from food (a light beer contains 100 calories–the same as a heaping spoonful of peanut butter).
In fact, alcohol contains 7 calories per gram, more than the 4 calories found in a gram of protein or carbohydrate and just under fat’s 9 calories per gram. “And once you’ve had one or two drinks,” Quagliani said, “who cares what you eat? Even if you had good intentions, you might relax.”
According to Fragale, many of her friends are aware of the caloric value of their drinks: “The next morning, they’re worried about how many calories they drank, not how much beer they drank.”
An easy habit to adopt
Dr. David Holben, a registered dietitian and associated professor of food and nutrition at Ohio University at Athens, has researched the Freshman 15 phenomenon among international students.
Motivated by a Taiwanese graduate student who noticed a modest weight gain upon moving to the United States, Holben collected height, weight and body-fat measurements and dietary records from a small sample of international students within two weeks of their arrival in this country.
The subjects–22 Asian, European and Middle Eastern men and women–were followed for 20 weeks, at the end of which Holben calculated an average weight gain of 3 pounds and an average body-fat increase of 5 percent.
Though these numbers fall short of the “Freshman 15” (some subjects actually lost weight, perhaps due to increased activity or enhanced diet awareness), food diaries revealed that, with the adoption of various “Americanized” foods came a rise in fat, salt and sugar and decreased fiber and calcium levels.
How ’bout a burger?
According to Holben, two main factors emerge in the existing body of research on food acculturation: cost and convenience.
“Fast food does typically fit the bill,” he said. “It’s inexpensive and it’s very convenient.”
Holben and his graduate student also brainstormed the possibility that international pupils may find themselves intrigued by the U.S. abundance of fast food.
“I think that in some cultures, fast food is not as available. If you were to go to Taiwan, it might be more expensive to eat at Pizza Hut because of the availability.”
But Holben’s intent is not to bash fast food.
“I don’t want to give fast food, or even fat, a bad name, because fat is necessary in the diet,” he said. Pizza, for instance, can establish itself as a healthy dietary addition: cheese is high in calcium, and the crust contains iron and B vitamins, all especially beneficial for female students. As Holben explained, much to the delight of students of all ages, “All foods can fit.”
