Staying Healthy in College is a Numbers Game
January 16, 2010 | Alicia Ostarello
Eat less, exercise more, and study!
When I went off to college, my mother gave me a big hug before she left my new dorm room; my father hugged me and handed me a calorie-counter, and said, “Remember: eat less, exercise more.” The freshman fifteen, the sophomore twenty, and the junior “I stopped weighing myself” are certainly scare tactics meant to keep college students healthy. Although there is truth to the numbers, if you know how to embody the simple advice that my father gave me, maintaining your weight through your years in college really is that easy.
Another way to think about eating less and exercising more is in calories-in and calories-out. If you want to maintain your weight, you want to find a sweet-spot between eating too much and eating too little; if you want to lose weight, you’ll want to work off more calories than you take in throughout the day.
Being alive requires calories. In fact, there’s a name for the amount of energy it takes to live: Basal metabolic rate, or your BMR. Your BMR consists of all those body functions you do without concentrating, from thoughts formulating in your noodle to your lungs filling and emptying, combined with your daily activities that we never consider as being calorie burning, such as showering, typing, and sauntering through the university bookstore. These calculations are based on your age, height and weight.
Once you know your BMR, you can start looking at how much exercise you do, or how much you want to do, and calculate from there how many calories you need to be healthy. Thankfully, the internet exists, and rather than having to shell out bucks for a nutrition and exercise specialist, you simply can hop online and get a really good estimate of your caloric needs.
Weight maintenance in college is super hard. You spend all day in class and studying or hanging out with friends, and unless you hang with the jocks or the cooks, you’re probably not getting a lot of exercise or eating gourmet meals with fresh-veggies from the farmer’s market. But by knowing what your body needs and paying just a smidgen of attention to what you eat, you can easily be healthy without eating too much less or exercising that much more.
Does anyone else have advice on staying healthy as a student? Or a better way of saying what my dad said to me? Let me know!
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