Is the Freshman 15 a Real Thing?
Back to school season is here, which means late nights, yummy foods, and a LOT of socializing. The freshman 15 (the weight gain many experience freshman year of college) is something we've all heard about, but is there any science behind it? In this episode, we figure out exactly what happens when we go back to school that makes it so hard to upkeep our usual health behaviors, and what can we do about it? Get ready for a deep dive into staying healthy, happy, and sane... even in school!
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Guest
Nick Townsend is a Professor of Public Health and Nutrition at the University of Bristol in the UK. His research focuses on cardiovascular disease in the UK.
The Takeaways
Freshman 15 = the fifteen pounds gained over the first year of college
07:12 - There is a misconception that metabolism slows in the early 20’s and 30’s however, weight gain in college is largely attributed to behavior change.
08:15 According to Townsend and colleagues’ meta analysis of the Freshman 15,
60% of college students gained weight in their freshman year
The Freshman 15 → is actually more like the Freshman 7.5 (lbs). Of students who gained weight, the average weight gained totaled 7.5 lbs.
Causes for weight gain in college
09:40 - Increased Alcohol intake: Of all the reasons for weight gain in college, alcohol made up the majority of weight gain in college individuals. Not only do alcoholic drinks take up a large number of calories, drinking also encourages more unhealthy behaviors – drunk eats & hangover food.
10:42 - Increased consumption of processed foods: from eating in dining halls, to the prevalence of chain restaurants on university campuses, to students’ lack of time and ability to cook, and financial limitations, it is hard for a new college student to have access to healthy food.
13:33 - Decreased physical activity: apart from college athletes, college students may become more sedentary. This is especially the case for women where there is a trend of declining physical activity after age 13.
14: 57 - Increased stress and lack of sleep: pulling all nighters and the stress to get good grades leads to poorer sleep and consequently, poorer eating and physical activity habits.
Ways to stay healthy in college:
18:47 - Eat while you drink: If you’re going to drink, make sure you are eating full meals and hydrating alongside alcoholic beverages.
19:26 - Drink in moderation or be comfortable not drinking sometimes: bring (non alcoholic) seltzers to the party just to hang with your friends or set a limit for yourself. College students aren’t drinking as much as you think.
21:19 - Maintain physical activity: join a sports club, walk or bike to class, go dancing
23:03 - Learn how to cook or meal prep: the more involved you are in food prep, the better the food is for you. Make cooking a social event with friends.
College is not just about getting good grades or finding yourself professionally or socially. It’s also about finding yourself in your creation of healthy habits and cultivating a positive relationship to food and the world around you.
Studies
Freshman 15 in England: a longitudinal evaluation of first year university student’s weight change
College Students are probably drinking less than you think they are, surveys show
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Juna [00:00:00] Food, We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living. So, Eddie, we've reached a pretty special time of the year.
Eddie [00:00:11] Oh, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Juna [00:00:14] Okay, what am I talking about?
Eddie [00:00:15] It's pumpkin spice season.
Juna [00:00:17] Hi. Yes.
Eddie [00:00:19] So, Juna, this is your favorite time of the year. Yeah. Pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin spice candles, pumpkin spice oatmeal. Pumpkin spice.
Juna [00:00:28] Yeah, that's true. Those are all my favorite things. It's my favorite time of the year. But we are not, in fact, finally doing our pumpkin spice episode, which would be a dream of mine. Actually, it is back to school season.
Eddie [00:00:43] Oh, okay. So, like buying pencils and notebooks and stuff. I used to love doing that as a kid.
Juna [00:00:48] Right. Well, okay, that's also not exactly what we're talking about today, but at least you're closer this time. Today we are talking about the infamous Hugh dramatic sound effect. Freshman 15.
Eddie [00:01:02] No, not the dreaded freshman, 15.
Juna [00:01:06] Oh, yes. We got so many questions from you guys all the time about basically staying healthy in school and staying healthy in college. Now, even for those of us that aren't in college anymore or haven't been for a long time.
Eddie [00:01:19] Hey, what are you trying to say?
Juna [00:01:21] Nothing. Of course I'm not insinuating anything. But, you know, for those of us that remember at college, there might have been a big shift in our weight. Or maybe there wasn't a shift in your weight. So today we're going to talk about whether or not the freshman 15 is a real thing. Should we be worried about it? And what can we do to ensure that we are staying as healthy as possible even while we're living on cup of noodles and ramen? Today, a deep dive into the freshman 15. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie [00:01:54] And I'm Dr. Eddie Philips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna [00:01:58] And you're listening to Food, We Need to Talk. The only health podcast that manages to include a pumpkin spice latte in basically every single episode.
Eddie [00:02:09] Hey, it makes us stand out.
Juna [00:02:17] Let's meet today's guest. This is Dr. Nick Townsend.
Nick Townsend [00:02:21] And I'm a professor in public health and nutrition at the University of Bristol in the UK.
Eddie [00:02:26] Juna, I think we need to make food. We need to talk a big thing in the UK. So many of our experts are coming to us from across the pond.
Juna [00:02:33] I know guys seriously if you're from the UK, DM us and let us know and say hi or leave us a review even better. Leave us a review and tell us in the review that you're from the UK. Now the freshman 15 goes by many names.
Nick Townsend [00:02:48] People talk about fresher five or fresher spread the fresher five referring to five kilos gained.
Eddie [00:02:53] So that would be about 11 pounds.
Juna [00:02:55] Right. But however you're referring to it, we are all talking about the same thing.
Nick Townsend [00:03:00] Freshman 15, really in reference to 15 lbs gained over the first year of college. So within the freshman year.
Eddie [00:03:07] So, you know, I love diving into the history of this stuff. But do we know where the term freshman 15 actually came from?
Nick Townsend [00:03:15] It's actually a bit difficult to kind of really work out where it first kind of came to fruition or became famous, in a sense. But it doesn't seem to really have come about within the academic literature, within the scientific literature came back with in the media, really. People talk about magazines using it kind of in the 1980s or the late 1980s and talk about the freshman 15. And that's really where it's got traction.
Juna [00:03:39] Okay. I'm a nosy person at heart, so I wanted to know more about Professor Townsend's like college experience, whether or not he experienced freshman 15. I want to know about whether you experienced freshman 15. So, Eddie, do you remember going off to college?
Eddie [00:03:53] Is this a test of my long term memory?
Juna [00:03:57] This is actually our memory episode, surprise.
Eddie [00:03:59] Yes, I remember. The thing about the dining hall was first off there was like all the food you wanted. And I remember running the soft serve ice cream machine to my heart's content.
Juna [00:04:09] So there's a lot of things that change when you go off to college. And the first thing that a lot of people talk about is the drinking. So I don't know if you've been to the UK.
Eddie [00:04:19] Oh yeah, I've been there a number of times and as you know, one of my kids actually went to St Andrews in Scotland for her four year college.
Juna [00:04:26] Right right right, So you can probably tell us then about all the pubs there.
Eddie [00:04:30] They are everywhere.
Juna [00:04:32] Okay. Well, the drinking age in England is also technically 18.
Eddie [00:04:37] Actually, fun fact. When I was in college, the drinking age was actually 18. Well, I remember bringing hard cider into the dining hall.
Juna [00:04:46] Whoa. Okay. I had no idea that the drinking age should ever change in the US, but okay. In England, the drinking age is 18, even to this day, and the culture in England is very different because these pubs are everywhere and they're really important gathering places for socializing. So for Professor Townsend, College actually wasn't this huge shift in his drinking like it is for a lot of people here maybe.
Nick Townsend [00:05:07] I was getting served in pubs. I looked quite old from about 16 onwards.
Eddie [00:05:11] Okay, well, as someone who really didn't go to a lot of bars or pubs as a teenager, I should say that when I got to college, there was a lot more opportunity to drink.
Juna [00:05:20] Right? And then there's also the food.
Nick Townsend [00:05:23] My first year of university, for example, I was in what's called halls of residence, which is very common within the UK. People live within these big tower blocks and actually the food is provided. So I didn't really cook myself very much for the first year.
Juna [00:05:36] But for Professor Townsend, freshman year did not necessarily result in the freshman 15.
Nick Townsend [00:05:43] So I didn't necessarily gain a huge amount of weight. I mean, I was I was quite active at the time, so I was trying to play the sport and using the gym and the facilities in that. But I think just like everybody now, I'm conscious of weight gain and I'm conscious of, you know, how easy it is to put on weight and then how difficult it is to kind of lose it again. And actually, you know, that's common among most people.
Juna [00:06:02] Okay, Eddie, now your turn. Did you see like this increasing your weight freshman year of college?
Eddie [00:06:07] No. Okay. Really, I have to say, I really didn't gain a lot of weight the freshman year. Mostly, I remember being really active, doing a lot of martial arts and so a lot of socializing, much to the detriment of my first semester grades.
Juna [00:06:19] Okay. Well, for me, I distinctly remember like gaining the freshman 17. So like I went ...was going to say I above and beyond, guys, come on, give me some credit. But yeah, I definitely remember gaining weight in college. So obviously we all had really different experiences. But before we actually talk about whether or not the freshman 15 is a myth, because as we can see here, we have pretty varied experiences. Let's talk about weight and aging because it seems like weight goes up in adulthood regardless of whether or not you're going to college.
Eddie [00:06:50] Ooh been there, done that.
Nick Townsend [00:06:52] So we know that muscle mass is going to increase up until about, you know, maybe late thirties, early forties. We know that as we get older from 18 onwards, there's an increase in socializing, there's an increase in risk taking. Generally what we do find is an increase in alcohol intake as well.
Eddie [00:07:05] So basically an increase in some not so healthy behaviors.
Juna [00:07:09] Okay, but socializing is a healthy thing, Eddie.
Eddie [00:07:12] That's true. That really is true. But still, one important thing to note here, Juna, is that it's not just a metabolism thing. A lot of people think that their metabolism is slowing down in their twenties and thirties, but it actually seems to be more of a behavior driven thing.
Juna [00:07:27] Right. You can hear more about that in one of our previous episodes on Metabolism with Dr. Herman Pontzer. But back to the freshman 15. Professor Townsend and colleagues decided to perform a meta analysis. Eddie, can you tell us what that is?
Eddie [00:07:43] Yes, a meta analysis is kind of a study of a bunch of other studies. If you think about it, one single study is probably not enough information to actually draw huge conclusions on. You may have not had enough people or maybe the way you ran the studies skew the data, so on. But if you have a bunch of studies and you look at all the results combined, then you can get a better idea of the overall trend in the research.
Juna [00:08:08] One of Professor Townsend PhD students decided to perform a meta analysis on studies looking at the freshman 15.
Nick Townsend [00:08:15] And we ended up with about 22 relevant studies, which gave us about five and a half thousand students overall. And then what we looked at within them was actually firstly the average total over weight gain and found that there was actually about 3 to 5 lbs over the course of of the year.
Eddie [00:08:33] Wait, 3 to 5 lbs? That's not even close to the 15.
Juna [00:08:36] Okay. Well, here's the thing. That number seems pretty low, but that number is also an average, which means it's taking into account not only the people that gained weight, but also the people that lost weight or stayed the same weight. But if we look at just the people that gained weight, which was a majority, so 60% of the population.
Nick Townsend [00:08:54] Those that did gain weight gained about seven and a half pounds a half, the freshman 15.
Eddie [00:09:02] So the verdict is in the freshman 15. Nice alliteration is actually more like the freshman 7.5, which.
Juna [00:09:10] Is not an insignificant amount of weight still.
Eddie [00:09:12] No, no. But it just doesn't have the same ring to it, you know, like freshman 15. It's just so much more catchy than the freshmen Seven and a half. Oceans 7.5.
Juna [00:09:25] Yeah, I know, I know. It doesn't sound good.
Eddie [00:09:27] Okay, so, Juna, do we know what's causing the freshman 15 discounted the 7.5 if it's not our metabolism?
Juna [00:09:34] Well, there's a couple of facets here, which we actually heard snippets of in all of our college experiences.
Nick Townsend [00:09:40] Generally, when we talk about the causes related to it, we talk about an increase in intake of unhealthy or processed kind of readily available foods, fast foods in nearby restaurants, but also food kind of on campus. We talk about maybe the stress of of college, of university, of people working very hard and potentially some decrease in levels of exercise. But really, when we look at a couple of studies that have kind of looked in depth, they suggest that actually alcohol intake explains the majority of that weight gain and in the number of individuals.
Eddie [00:10:11] Oh, my gosh. So drinking is the main problem here.
Juna [00:10:15] Guys, the quote is true. You can blame it on the alcohol. Do you know that song that's by T-Pain? That's like a real song. So again, this is population based. That means it's not true for every individual. Like, for example, for me, being the extremely cool person I am, I almost never drank in college, but I did find all the other factors did play a really important role in my life. So let's start talking about all those factors a bit more in detail.
Eddie [00:10:42] You know, I think for me, the food really stands out. I went from eating what my mom was cooking at home every day to going with my friends and just having a lot of cafeteria food.
Juna [00:10:51] Yeah. So I grew up in a house where the majority of the food we ate was vegetables. It's very Mediterranean, okay? We're Albanian. So it was mostly tomatoes, cucumber and feta cheese. Like that's kind of the staples of the diet. And when I went to the dining hall, there was way less vegetables and like they had tomatoes in the salad bar. But I'm a tomato snob to my core. So when I had there, like, nasty, gritty, flavorless, watery tomatoes, I was just like, no, look, I just I don't want this if it's not good. Like, I just don't want it.
Eddie [00:11:19] And what about eating out? How'd that work?
Juna [00:11:22] Okay. Well, again, in high school when I had dinner, it was like that was the end of my eating day. Like, no more food for the rest of the day. But in college, there are literally places that are known for being open for after you go out partying or you drink. So, for example, Insomnia Cookies was named that because you would get it at 2 a.m. after you had gone out. So I don't even think I've seen an insomnia cookie in the daylight.
Eddie [00:11:47] They don't exist.
Juna [00:11:48] Yeah, no, no, they just. They just appear after midnight.
Eddie [00:11:51] So. All right, if I do show up at 2 a.m.. Yeah. What are these things like? Tell me about these cookies.
Juna [00:11:56] It's basically like a freshly baked cookie. Like, well, I'm sure they don't freshly bake it, but they have it there. They warm it up for you, so it's like gooey. And then you can get it with ice cream. And of course, they have a million flavors and it's like, it's really good. I mean, it tastes even better at 2 a.m. for some reason, it's like even better.
Nick Townsend [00:12:11] We can't ignore the intake of these kind of readily processed foods and the use of fast food restaurants, particularly with people kind of leaving home for the first time and not maybe necessarily having the skills to actually cook healthily. But also the money is really important as well. A lot of university students, they're not flush with cash. They're trying to pay their fees. They're trying to, you know, live economically as well. And that does mean actually there are some restrictions on buying some of the more expensive products which generally kind of fall on the fresh product, such as fresh fruit and vegetables.
Eddie [00:12:40] Preparing fresh food takes skills. Yeah, it takes time. It takes money. And those are all things that many college students just don't usually have.
Juna [00:12:48] No.
Nick Townsend [00:12:49] The other thing that I think we're seeing within a number of universities around the world is maybe a privatization of the food outlets on campus. Companies will come in and provide food, so you'll get kind of you might get fast food joints on campus or you might get big companies providing food. They're trying to make a profit. And so they are, you know, relying on processed food, developing those kind of foods are easy to store.
Juna [00:13:12] Ayeee insomnia.
Eddie [00:13:16] And we know that processed foods are a lot more convenient for the big companies to sell. And as we've talked about on other episodes, a lot worse for our health. And this doesn't just apply to students who live in dorms. Actually, many, if not a majority of undergraduates are in community colleges or not living in dorms.
Juna [00:13:33] Mm hmm. So even, like, getting takeout and bringing it back to your apartment, right? You're always getting takeout. That's also going to affect your eating. Now, let's shift gears a bit and talk about physical activity. So when I was in middle school, I played outside all the time and my sisters, I played a lot of sports, kickball. It was so fun. But then when I was in high school, I didn't play any sports and I was surprised to find that this is actually a pretty common trend specifically among girls,.
Nick Townsend [00:14:03] Really we find among among women is among girls. It's quite common in adolescence for physical activity levels to decline from 13 onwards.
Eddie [00:14:11] I feel that when I was a teenage boy, there was always pressure for me to get more and more into fitness.
Juna [00:14:16] Okay. Well, again, the experience for people can be highly individual.
Nick Townsend [00:14:20] You can see it within universities, particularly in America. America has much greater investment in athletic programs and sports programs in the universities than there was in the UK. And you'll get much greater variation. You'll get people who maybe don't feel they were ever kind of part of it then they don't engage with those types of sports that the university supports. And actually, there may be a drop off kind of with those individuals, but then you get some people who are on sports programs who have never trained so hard. You know, they come from high school to then university.
Eddie [00:14:49] So we have less activity. Yeah, particularly for women. And we have an environment with less home cooked food and probably a lot more processed food.
Juna [00:14:57] Yeah. And then, of course, we cannot forget sleep and stress.
Nick Townsend [00:15:02] Any lecturer like myself or any professor like myself who gives lectures on a 9:00 on a morning, you know that if you're doing an early morning lecture that actually not going to get as many as if you're doing it kind of middle of the afternoon.
Juna [00:15:14] Any attendant of morning lectures can also attest that you are definitely not getting enough sleep because you're basically just sleeping in class.
Eddie [00:15:23] All right. So these factors all kind of feed into each other, like your stress and your sleep also then affect your food choices and then your movement patterns.
Juna [00:15:31] And of course, we skimmed this earlier, but we need to do a deeper dive into the biggest factor that affect the freshman 15.
Eddie [00:15:40] Do we need it on the rocks, as they say, or no more watering it down.
Juna [00:15:43] That's right, guys. We're talking about alcohol straight up right after this break.
Eddie [00:15:58] Food We Need to talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, the home of Full Plate Living. Full Plate Living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples, beans, strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full plate living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at full plate living.org.
Juna [00:16:39] And we're back and we're talking about the biggest contributor to our newly named freshman, 7.5.
Eddie [00:16:46] Contrary to what you might think, alcohol is actually really calorically dense, especially something like beer. And as we've covered in past episodes, your overall calorie balance is going to be what determines your changes in weight.
Nick Townsend [00:16:59] I think when you look at something like binge drinking, which is unfortunately common within both the UK and the US, particularly in that kind of age group, then you find that actually you're talking to people that are drinking four or five, six kind of drinks an evening. More people will laugh at the idea of only drinking for four drinks is binge drinking.
Juna [00:17:18] So if you're drinking four or five beers, guys, I know you're just like, you're downin' them. You don't even care. You're like, Whatever. Who cares? That's like half your day's worth of calories just in drinks.
Eddie [00:17:28] Plus, it's not just about the calories from the alcohol.
Nick Townsend [00:17:31] We also know that when people are drinking, that actually is associated with other kind of unhealthy behaviors. We generally don't go out for a few drinks and then go and buy some salads, queue up for some broccoli or something like that. You know, we end up in pizza restaurant, so we end up in particular in the UK. We get to Indian restaurants and things like that.
Juna [00:17:49] Like imagine like you finish, you're out with your friends, you're like, let's, let's get some salads. Salads go at 3 a.m., but we can't forget about what happens also, the day after drinking.
Nick Townsend [00:18:04] You will crave again high fat, high sugar foods, high calorie foods when your hangover, your your body feels depleted and it would need to replenish that. You're obviously dehydrated. Of course, that could be an impact on your body's trying to recover. And we know that alcohol impinges on things like muscular development. You know, you won't have athletes who are in training, drinking a lot of alcohol because it does kind of impinge on those types of things.
Eddie [00:18:28] Now, I think we should say here, this doesn't mean that you should eat less food so you can drink more.
Juna [00:18:35] Right. So I know I was often tempted in college to basically skip dinner so I could leave calories for drinking. And this is like the worst idea I've ever probably had. Guys.
Nick Townsend [00:18:47] One night drinking alcohol can be very dangerous and certainly can kind of high levels of toxicity, particularly people are downing things like, you know, shots of spirits where they have less control over it. And actually a good way to control the impacts on your body is to eat at the same time as what to drinking water alongside. So yeah, don't ever kind of think, well, it's a gin and tonic or a banana. It's one of the other. If you're going to have a gin and tonic, have the banana as well, because actually it's going to be better for you. It's going to be healthier for you in the long run.
Juna [00:19:13] So now I know what you're all wondering. How do we actually maintain our healthy habits in adulthood, whether you're in college or not? Without becoming a boring hermit, that never goes out, myself.
Eddie [00:19:26] You know, I think just like everything else, it's the dose that makes the poison a little bit of alcohol is probably okay. A lot --That's when it becomes a poison. We can still drink responsibly in moderation and hang out with our friends if we want to.
Nick Townsend [00:19:40] We have to recognize that alcohol is central to a lot of social activities. You know, it's central to the way that we socialize.
Juna [00:19:48] But that being said, you don't have to drink when you're going out. I think I felt a lot of pressure in college to drink, to be a part of the group and then like, Oh, I'm only comfortable if I'm drinking when I'm out, blah, blah, blah. But the reason it seems like everyone in college is drinking is because that minority of people who are are very loud and very visible.
Eddie [00:20:11] Right. Here are some stats Juna of a survey done at the University of Florida. They looked at 2500 students in the spring of 2020. About 42% of them had never consumed alcohol or not done so. Within two weeks of responding of the students who drank, within three months of the survey, three quarters of them reported having four or fewer drinks last time they drank in a social setting.
Juna [00:20:34] Okay. So translation, almost half of the people hadn't even drunk in the past three weeks or had never drunk. And then for the people that had drunk in the past three months, like the vast majority had had four or less drinks. So it's really not as crazy as like a lot of movies may make it seem, you know, also, you can bring your own drinks to parties, guys, if you don't want to drink alcohol, if you just want to like have something in your hand to be a part of the group, you know, I'm saying. And now we can kind of shift gears and talk about physical activity. So there's a lot of sitting that happens in college or in lecture halls and dining halls. You're chilling with your friends. Professor Townsend says it's all about finding ways to maintain your physical activity however you can.
Nick Townsend [00:21:19] There's so many other opportunities on offer within universities for the types of activities that people can do that are both social and active, you know, from less competitive dancing clubs right up to the more invested kind of sports programs.
Juna [00:21:34] There's also something else you can do to maintain your activity, which Eddie is really, really good at.
Nick Townsend [00:21:40] The other thing is active transport, so people cycling or walking to campus or walking around universities rather than necessarily kind of taking the bus every day or driving onto campus is another way that people can actually support their activity levels.
Eddie [00:21:53] Yes, it's true. I try to take my bike everywhere. It's a great way to sort of clear my head after work or just get me sort of warmed up before work.
Juna [00:22:01] Yeah. He takes meetings on his bike, guys, like. Is that like that's a biking hazard. Although we can't really see him, so I guess it's not looking at his phone, but he's. He's biking, taking meetings.
Eddie [00:22:12] But, Juna, I think we have to get back to the food.
Juna [00:22:15] Yeah, we should. So the food is really hard, in my opinion. I think it might be the hardest thing that you have because you really can't control the stuff that's being offered in your dining hall or the kinds of food places that you're surrounded by.
Eddie [00:22:28] That's true. But I think we can first say that we need to set ourselves up for success by managing our stress levels and trying to get a good night's sleep, as we learned in our stress episode. Stress actually changes your food cravings and may make you hungrier and not getting enough sleep may do something similar.
Juna [00:22:44] And we'll be talking about that in a future episode very soon. But yeah, I guess the thing is that you have to try to make the best choices wherever you are at. So, for example, for me that meant really prioritizing my vegetables and protein because I feel like those are things that will make me feel full and also have the most micronutrients.
Eddie [00:23:03] And for those of you that live in an apartment, learning how to cook or meal prep would probably put you eons ahead of your peers. And I do have to disclose that I only learned how to cook maybe a couple of years ago during the pandemic.
Juna [00:23:16] Yeah, but you did.
Eddie [00:23:17] I did it. Yeah. And I'm proud of myself.
Nick Townsend [00:23:19] Think about food preparation. Learn food preparation, learn cooking, try and buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The closer you are involved in your food preparation, from growth to the plate, you know the better for you.
Juna [00:23:32] And you don't have to make it this crazy, hardcore thing that you spend all Sunday doing.
Nick Townsend [00:23:38] Look at making that social event. Look at cooking for each other. You know, don't just cook your own meals. Maybe you've got roommate, so you've got friends, can invite them around and cook for each other on different evenings and things like that.
Eddie [00:23:48] I love that. Juna, I always say the most instructive conversations I had in college were not in the classrooms with the professors. It was in the dining hall with my peers.
Nick Townsend [00:23:58] Don't get just bogged down in your studies university is about experience. It's about enjoying yourself is meeting people. So these types of things, it's not just about passing exams and just getting kind of from your freshman year to graduation. It's about the whole experience throughout the year and that shouldn't be lost in mounds of alcohol and processed food because of access. So many of the things that you can be doing over that time.
Juna [00:24:24] We often think of college as this time to find ourselves. But Professor Townsend made this great point, which is that it's not about just your studies. It's about finding yourselves in many ways.
Nick Townsend [00:24:38] As you find yourself, as, you know, your relationship with food and the food that you like eating, but also find yourself with physical activity. And it's not all about sports. There's so many things you can be doing. And they're social and they're fun, you know, and all this stuff and engage in engage in all of that. And so enjoy your food and enjoy physical activity, but find the things that you enjoy and actually Don't think about it as "I enjoy eating" as "I enjoy food."
Juna [00:25:01] That is so different than the mindset I had in college where I was literally terrified of gaining weight and eating too much and like thinking, Oh my God, I don't want to go out because we're going to eat junk food. I wish I had this more exploratory mindset towards food and exercise earlier in my life.
Eddie [00:25:19] And you know what? Enjoying your food does not include what? Stressing about your food.
Juna [00:25:25] True.
Nick Townsend [00:25:26] Try to relax try not to get too focused on it. You know, don't get too stressed about this kind of thing and don't take it on board personally. We seem to stigmatize weight gain. We seem to stigmatize overweight and obesity quite a lot. Let's avoid doing that.
Juna [00:25:38] If you listened to our History of Dieting podcast, then you know there was a time when you would brag about how much weight you gained in college because it was a sign that you were happy and thriving. So basically I was like super thriving in college I was like "I'm having the time of my life."
Eddie [00:25:55] Mom, Dad look at me now, look at me.
Juna [00:25:56] So if anything, don't freak out about it like I did, because I feel like that led to super unhealthy behaviors like over restriction, which are way worse for you than just a few extra pounds.
Eddie [00:26:11] On that note, Juna, I think it's a great time to wrap up this episode. Moral of the story. Enjoy your time in college. Yeah. Don't stress too much about the freshman 7.5. And maybe regardless of weight, drinking in moderation is a really good idea.
Juna [00:26:27] And I'm really glad we had this really long podcast episode to come to the conclusion that maybe we should drink in moderation.
Juna [00:26:39] Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. You can find our show notes on our website. foodweneedtotalk.com. You can find me on Instagram @theofficialjuna and Juna Gjata on YouTube and Tik Tok. You can find Eddie trying a pumpkin spice latte on our Instagram, so please join us for that. Food, We Need to Talk is produced by PRX.
Eddie [00:27:04] Our producers are Morgan Flannery and Rebecca Seidel.
Juna [00:27:08] Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer with production support from Jennifer Weingarten.
Eddie [00:27:12] Jocelyn Gonzalez is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna [00:27:17] Food, We Need to Talk was co-created by Carrie Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie [00:27:23] Always remember consult with your health professional for your personal health questions. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review. Tell a friend.
Juna [00:27:32] Yeah. Thank you.
Eddie [00:27:33] Thanks for listening.
