Freshmen Fifteen

You may be the all star ice hockey player at your high school. You may be the best football player in the region. Or you may just enjoy walking long distances. However, when freshmen arrive at college they may see reduced free time to get the amount of exercise that their body has been used to the last eighteen years of their lives. This may lead to the freshmen fifteen. The infamous phrase for weight gain during a freshmen first year tenure.

Why does this happen?

Many freshmen were used to busy schedules in high school: such as, participating in after school sports and playing with friends. Your metabolism is also a lot faster as a teenager in high school. When you arrive at college you'll find that you don't regularly participate in physical activity (neither do the other students in your hall). The common/dinner hall is also an all you can eat buffet, which leads many students to over consume. Instead of working it off however, students find it hard between their studies to find time to do physical activity.

Many freshmen are also new to the binge drinking experience. You may have drank one or two nights a week in high school, but in college every night can turn into a drinking night. Remember that every light beer has around 150-200 calories, and every shot of grain alcohol is equivalent to one beer. So if you drink twelve beers a night, your looking at adding 1800 calories at the minimum to your diet a day.

Put the joy sticks down.

It's important to find time for the gym. Now I'm not saying to be a meat head, and go pick things up and put them down. You can run around the track, play basketball,  play bad mitten or tennis.  Just remember to get some exercise, or you may see a double chin in your facebook pics.