Posted: 9/9/08
While most students were getting a head start on that freshman fifteen, I spent my summer trying to achieve the almost unachievable.
This is no easy task, as many RU-Newark residents know, healthy living isn’t exactly synonymous with the college lifestyle. Student life is full of stress, sitting on you butt trying to beat the latest 70-hour game and eating Funions as a meal. Funions are not a meal they are a cry for help.
I was no different; I was actually the pudgy poster child of the sedimentary lifestyle that plagues most college students.
As I reached the twilight of my undergraduate career something dawned on me, I didn’t gain the freshman 15, for me it was more like the freshman 130. I was a cheese doddle away from washing myself with a rag on a stick. Something needed to be done -something drastic, but something inexpensive.
If my pockets were as fat as I was, I would have no problem; unfortunately, I was the broke college student trying to get by on a minimum wage job. My empty bank account was not all I had in common with the average college student.
“College students aren’t thinking of being healthy,” says Dr. Sandra Samuels, MD, Medical Director of the Rutgers Newark Health Center, ” and that’s the problem.”
Getting Fit For FREE at Rutgers
According to a 2007 study at the university of New Hampshire out of 800 students at least one-third were overweight or obese, 8 percent of men had metabolic syndrome, 60 percent of men had high blood pressure, and more than two-thirds of women were not meeting their nutritional needs for iron or calcium.
Not only are we as college students under the mental stress of achievement we are putting our bodies through abuse without much of a second thought. Continue reading “I wanted to get fit and healthy while staying on a college campus”