Healthy Living for Every Body
“Eating well on campus.” For some, this sounds like an oxymoron. For others, it feels like an unattainable goal, a well-intended New Year’s resolution broken by January 10th. What does “eating well” mean, anyway? Here’s my definition of eating well: It means listening to your body for hunger and fullness cues. It means eating a variety of foods, including carbs and even some chocolate!
Living on a college campus creates unique challenges to eating well:
- Many of you came from a home where mom or dad would make the meal and you would simply eat what’s put in front of you without much thought. Now, your meals are prepared by “Momma Lottie” and you have three entrees from which to choose, not to mention ala carte options. Then, there’s “dessert lane” that’s hard to resist. These things can make eating well and making good choices difficult and overwhelming.
- Another challenge to eating well on campus has to do with your killer schedules. It’s tough when you have classes from 10am to 5pm with no time for lunch. It’s only in college where you need to get up at 8am for a class and stay up to 2am to study on a regular basis. Overeating can be hard to resist during those late nights.
- One more challenge to eating healthy on campus is peer pressure. How many of you compare what you’re eating to what others are eating? When we succumb to peer pressure, food choices aren’t made by internal hunger cues but by our surroundings. If one person gets dessert then it’s “safe” for all of us to get it. And how many of you have eaten food at dorm programs or scarfed a late night pizza not because you’re hungry, but just because everyone else is?
 One way many people try to eat healthy is dieting. As a dietician, I have a number of concerns about dieting:
- Dieting doesn’t teach you how to change eating habits. During a diet, as long as you have willpower, you lose weight. However, you won’t be on the diet forever and you will more than likely go back to old eating patterns.
- Dieting is expensive. Costs for diet pills, membership fees, and supplemental food add up.
- Dieting can decrease your metabolism. If you are on a diet that’s less than 1200 calories, your body goes into starvation mode, your metabolism decreases to compensate, and it’s harder to lose weight.
- Ninety-five percent of dieters gain back the weight, so dieting is not a good way to make lasting change.
- Dieting doesn’t take into account your body’s natural weight range. Instead, it relies on external charts to determine your “ideal” weight, which may be unrealistic.
- Yo-yo dieting (losing and gaining weight in repetitive cycles) can ultimately lead to increased weight gain.
- Dieting can lead to an eating disorder. Virtually all people who end up with an eating disorder started with a diet.
The way I recommend for combating these challenges to healthy eating is to change your habits. Here are some suggestions:
- Eat breakfast. It gets your metabolism going in the morning and it will help you concentrate better in those early classes.
- Don’t go more than 5 hours without eating. When you get too hungry you are more likely to overeat at the next meal.
- Watch portion size. Most of us eat a good variety of food, but simply too much of it.
- Look for color on your plate at each meal. Most color comes in the form of fruits and vegetables. When we don’t eat enough of these things, we typically overeat higher calorie, less nutritious foods.
- Limit desserts to one per day.
- Eat protein at each meal. This can be in the form of dairy products, meat, or a meat substitute. Protein helps carbohydrates digest more slowly, helping you feel fuller longer.
- Listen to hunger cues. What are you hungry for? Are you really hungry, or are you stressed, upset, anxious? If you find yourself eating “emotionally” often, work on developing some other ways to deal with those feelings
- Get out and move. It will increase your metabolism and simply make you feel better.
Changing food habits takes time, but ultimately is more successful than dieting. Don’t try and change everything at once. Focus on one suggestion each month to develop that particular habit. In the long run, you will feel better and have better success in your goal of eating well on campus.
To learn more, we recommend the book Eating Well on Campus, by nutritionist Ann Selkowitz. This book is available in the College bookstore.
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