College Pitfalls
If you let it, college can prove to be a disastrous time for your health. Why? Before college, you are still considered a child. You are viewed as an extension of your parents or guardians. After college, however, you are expected to get a job, go on to higher education, and perhaps settle down and start a family of your own. You’ve become your own person, independent of your parents. The time you spend in college is when you find yourself, cliché as that might sound. College life presents you with a slew of new challenges and pressures, all of which teach you how to handle life as an adult. But, if you don’t see them coming, they could send you hurtling into a dependency on, among other things, food.
Before I left home for my freshman year at Princeton University, my parents let me know that even though I was attending a rigorous university I would not be allowed to get away with poor performance. Introducing pressure #1: grades. On some level, everyone views grades as a judgment of their personal worth: How good is my work? How good am I? To this internalized valuing of grades add the fact that you are living 24/7 with hundreds, if not thousands, of your peers, all struggling to get the same grades you want, all adding to your stress.
Unfortunately, goading you to do your best in school is not the only kind of pressure
these peers will exert on you. Feeling as if you have to fit in with the crowd
doesn’t end when you graduate from high school; many college students still
find it difficult to resist doing what (it seems) everyone else around 
them is
doing, even when they know it’s a bad idea. This can apply to anything from
drinking six strawberry daiquiris at an off-campus party, to eating the kind of
stuff you’d never have put in your body before you got to school. Standing
up to this kind of group-think can be very difficult, but I promise you it can
be done and you won’t find yourself friendless.
For instance, a woman in my dorm, Lydia, says her roommates like to wrap up long nights of studying with a trip to the university store for a pint of gourmet ice cream—each. Unfortunately, long nights are fairly coxmmon in college, so she was eating ice cream at least three times a week after midnight. Because the event had become a tradition, she felt awkward saying that she didn’t want to partake. Lydia knew she wasn’t eating because she was hungry; it was a way to socialize and she didn’t want to feel like a party pooper. She dealt with the issue by getting a low-fat frozen yogurt or a frozen fruit bar instead of ice cream; this way she could still be with her friends and enjoy their company without all the extra calories. They teased her the first time, of course, but after a few trips many of them were choosing the healthier option, too. They didn’t lose their tradition; they just adjusted it.
Most first-year college students are also subjected to the stress of having to live in the same room with a complete stranger. You have none of your own space, no privacy, no previous bond of friendship, no escape from the constant scrutiny of someone you don’t even know. You might find yourself paired with a nocturnal vampire who simply refuses to do her work during the day, but who is up writing papers at 3 a.m. beneath the soothing glow of fluorescent light bulbs. Add to this stress the fact that you are away from home for an extended period, possibly for the first time in your life. Often, it seems that (insert favorite junk food) is the only cure for homesickness. . . . If only baby carrots did the trick! Thankfully, as you make more friends and get accustomed to your new surroundings, homesickness diminishes. Heck, you may even grow fond of your roomie eventually; most people do. And, in the meantime, you’ll get to practice your negotiating skills and ability to compromise.
As if roommates, homesickness, course workloads, and the stress of fitting in were not enough to deal with, college cafeterias offer a huge variety of processed carbohydrates for you to load up on, especially if you find yourself grabbing food on the go. A bagel with cream cheese is one of the most common breakfast fallbacks; a box of some sweetened, refined cereal is another. Both are loaded with refined flour, which turns straight into sugar a few minutes after you eat it, leaving you famished within two hours.
The communal dining experience on campus also means you are constantly eating
in the company of others, which introduces a new pressure, especially for young
women: eat less than everyone around you. No one wants to look like a pig who
can’t get food onto her fork fast enough, so girls will often, subconsciously
or not, start comparing how and what they eat to the girls around them. This can
sometimes lead to a subliminal, or overt, competition over who eats what and how
much. Though you may have eaten communally in your high school cafeteria, you
did not eat all your meals surrounded by peers. You were able to make at least
some of your dining decisions in the comfort of your own home. At college, all
of these choices are made very public when everyone else is watching you eat all
the time.
If you think about it, the girls around you are all under the same pressures you are to keep up with work and friends and family; sooner or later, the stress gets to everybody. They also have the media cramming the idea that “super thin is in” down their throats, and frustration can set in when they find themselves unable to fulfill their super-model wannabe dream. It can create a lot of anxiety when you feel that you constantly need to compete with everyone around you—not just in terms of how thin you are, but also for a place on an athletic team, for academic standing in class, or even over a certain boy. In extreme cases, these pressures can lead to an eating disorder.
