College can be the time of your life. If you let it, it can also be a time to gain weight and get out of shape. Let’s face it, you don’t live at your parents’ house anymore. No one is cooking for you, making sure you lay off of the alcohol and forcing you to go to soccer practice. In light of that, here are some tips to stay healthy and ward off those extra pounds during your first year at college!
For many people, college is a time of freedom. A time to socialize without a curfew, this often means house parties, frat parties, bars, clubs, beer and binge drinking.
Not only is alcohol high in calories, but it is bad for your liver and muscle strength. Drinking alcohol decreases the efficiency of your workouts by decreasing the speed at which your muscles recover. At seven beers or shots of liquor a night and 100 to 300 calories per drink, this will not only add to your waistline but will take away from your fitness and overall health!
Realistically, you probably will drink. So keep your intoxicated nights to two to three times per week with two to three drinks per night. If you want to go out more often than that, just remember, you can still have fun without the booze!
This one is tough. Unless you have a nutrition degree, it is hard to navigate a dining hall in a healthy way. Most of this food is processed and can have hidden fats and sugars even when it looks healthy! Dining Hall food is usually free, which makes it even harder to control your urge to get seconds on dinner and then seconds on dessert.
Use a small plate, make half of your plate fruits and vegetables, make your serving of carbohydrate rich foods no bigger than your fist and make sure you have a source of lean protein with each meal. Let’s limit dessert to two or three nights a week.
This is probably the last time in your life that you will ever have a free gym membership. You will also have club sports, intermural sports and intramural sports galore to be a part of. Not only are these great ways to stay in shape at college, but the gym and sports teams are a great way to socialize and meet people with similar interests to you.
Don’t be a bum—go play! Try to exercise at least three or four times a week for 30 to 60 minutes each time.
This was my favorite part of college. Claim to fame: I once went a week without spending a dollar on food (this was when I did not have a meal plan). My college was the bomb at having free food everywhere on campus.
The more involved on campus you are the more free food there is to eat. But be careful! Free food often consists of cookies and pizza. These foods add up in calories from sugars and bad fats quickly! Go ahead, eat the free food, but make sure that 80 percent of your meals are balanced and healthy to ward off the extra pounds that will inevitably come with the constant supply of free food.
I know what you’re thinking. I can’t eat free food and I can’t eat dining hall food, so what can I eat?
You can still eat dining hall food and free campus food, but eat these foods in moderation and watch your portion sizes! Making half of your plate fruits and vegetables, a quarter of the plate carbohydrates and a quarter of your plate protein will be a great way to ensure that you are not over indulging at mealtimes.
Which foods at the dining hall and free food events should you focus on? Focus on nutrient rich foods. A good way to know if a food is nutrient rich is if it has been through as little processing as possible, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. If you can tell where the food came from, there is a good chance that it is nutrient rich. An example of this is an egg came from an egg, a fish came from a fish, vegetables and fruits came from their respective plants as compared with cookies whose many ingredients are unknown. As far as which fruits and vegetables to aim for, think the more color the better.
Focus on whole foods and you can’t go wrong!
Most of us gain weight when we indulge in foods that are high in sugar, refined starches and fats that are often found in processed foods like cookies, granola bars, chips and crackers or basically anything that was once dough. Most of the foods in the modern day diet contain carbohydrates and sugars, so it is also easy to over indulge in these nutrients. Focusing on protein rich foods at meal and snack times can help you to divert your attention from your carby-friends.
Some lean sources of protein to focus on are meats, poultry, fish, low-fat cheeses, Greek yogurt, nuts and beans.
Fiber is a friend that will keep you full, but won’t add to your waistline. Fiber is the bulk of fruit, vegetables and whole grains that doesn’t get digested. Its function is keeping you full and forming the bulk of your stools. Eating fiber with all of your meals and snacks is a good way to make sure that you don’t overindulge in other foods that will move through your system rapidly so that you stay hungry. It also slows down the digestion of other nutrients to help to regulate your metabolism.
Make sure to include fruit, vegetables and whole grains at your meal times to ensure that you are getting in enough fiber!
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