The Freshman 15 is a fixture of the college mythos. Your parents probably brought it up in the car on the way down. You might even own a book on it. Older friends are living testaments, lamenting to the pounds they packed on during their first year away from home.
And let's be honest, undergrads have a lot working against them.
Most aren't accustomed to daily buffet-style meals, nor has it occurred to many others that their athletic glory days of high school are over. Athens' carb-centric and lively-but-still-rather-sedentary nightlife is just as big a culprit as any.
The Freshman 15 can't be attributed to dining hall gluttony and uptown watering holes alone, however. Rather, it's a corpulent cadre of other factors. Most studies agree that a student's weight gain occurs over the course of college, meaning it lingers after those two years in the dorms.
One would be hard-pressed to find too many dorm dwellers munching on kale and hummus sandwiches between class. It goes without saying our already standstill metabolisms just bumped down a gear.
As many a car trunk and disgruntled parent will attest, college freshmen have no problem with carrying extra baggage. What makes the Freshman 15 any different?
In fact, a whole host of problems come from putting on weight, especially quickly.
Fifteen pounds can bump the body mass index of someone who is 5 feet 7 inches tall by two-and-a-half points, and two points for a 6-footer. Bear in mind it could take at least five points to go from a normal range BMI to an obese one.
Which brings us to the O-word. Obesity causes less blood flow throughout the body, usually because of constricted arteries, high cholesterol levels and a belabored heart weighed down by fat. The result is an unnerving correlation between obesity and cases of stroke and heart disease.
Simply bearing more weight affects our body's support systems, too. Joint problems, back problems and respiratory problems run rampant in the obese demographic. Extra weight pressing down on the chest can jostle one's breathing patterns when lying down and could cause sleeping disorders, namely sleep apnea.
These accompany the slew of other maladies weight gain and obesity bring. Type 2 diabetes plagues overweight America and reduces eating habits to a strict, fatless diabetic diet that could require antidiabetic medication.
And although most college students aim to be as infertile as possible, obesity may cause long-term hormonal shifts that can disrupt regular menstrual cycles and sperm counts. Breast cancer numbers also rise in obesity cases, as do statistics for prostate cancer and cancer of the endometrium, the lining of the uterus.
But lo, there may be solace for the collegiate eater.
As fun as this phenomenon rolls off the tongue, a recent article in USA Today claimed the Freshman 15 is more of a Freshman Eight, a figure found in a 2006 study that averaged participants from Purdue and Brown universities. And in that study, freshmen from Brown weighed-in their first-year weight gain closer to a Freshman Five.
That's encouraging. It's still even alliterative.
Now that it's not so daunting, how does one go about curbing bad habits and curb stomping first-year weight gain altogether? The best place to start is the dining hall. The less you carry to a table and more trips you take will make that unnecessary ice cream bar taste much worse. Hit the salad bar and get rid of your trays, Bobcats.
Adam Liebendorfer is a sophomore studying journalism and Spanish and a columnist for The Post. Send him a nice, juicy e-mail at al211307@ohiou.edu
4 Opinion
Adam Liebendorfer
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