Avoiding The Freshman Fifteen

It's not just beer: girly drinks make you fat too. I slowly came to this horrible realization as I did a particularly tenacious wiggle into my favorite jeans around the third week of my freshman year of college. Like any good fresher I'd been doing my fair share of partying, which for me meant getting a group together and hitting one of the other consortium schools to engaged in a little boozefueled craziness. I knew that alcohol was full of calories but thought that by avoiding beer I'd be escaping the worst of it. I was wrong. I looked in the mirror and sighed at my massive muffintops, signaling just how incorrect I had been.

As I made my way down the hall in search of a scale to see exactly how far gone I was, I started to think. It wasn't only the liquor, I hadn't been doing much all day except for sitting at my desk and writing papers and emails. Though I was temped to blame my avoidance of activity on the sheer glee that came from no more mandatory phys. ed., it occurred to me that I had been insanely lazy and sedentary. When I finally found that scale and discovered that I had put on exactly 11lbs. since the last time I'd weighed myself midsummer, I knew it was time to do something.

Now food for me is something on which I'm hardly willing to compromise. As much as I hate exercise I would run a mile every day if it meant I could have that brownie after dinner. So dieting was out. Instead, I made a contract with myself. If you drink, you run. During weeks where I planned to drink during the weekend, I made sure to set aside an hour to walk over the gym, hit the elliptical for a couple of miles, do some light mat work, shower and head home.

It worked. Not only did it work, my legs looked awesome and toned that semester. A couple of friends noticed and went on the same regime. You should've seen their legs. The point is, there're loads of ways to avoid the dreaded freshman fifteen. For people that want to be active but hate the gym there're intramural sports. For people who don't want to be bothered with getting up at all there's avoiding the onion rings and fries at meals. I even knew a girl who, when she realized that she was starting to gain weight from her lethargic tendencies, joined an extra committee on student senate so she would be forced to walk back and forth across campus two extra nights a week. The key to keeping healthy is figuring out what works best for you and sticking with it.