Do you find yourself eating more “comfort foods” like macaroni and cheese and hot cocoa when the daylight hours are shorter and temperatures outside much lower? Do you gravitate towards pasta-vegetable salads and chilled lemonade in the long, hot days of summer?

These are just a few examples of dietary cycles triggered by the change of seasons, and rarely are they cause for alarm. But what about those dietary cycles created by your academic schedule? Can your waistline withstand four years or more of midterms, semester breaks and finals?

Food and College Life

There’s nothing quite like college life. Course schedules change every 3 months, so just about when you’ve gotten used to waking up at the right time each day of the week, that schedule’s over and another one begins. Coursework grows more difficult with each passing week, then before you’ve even bought all your books it’s time to take midterms. Midterm grades haven’t been posted when it’s time to sit for finals. If you weren’t a stress eater before you arrived on campus, the demands of the academic cycle can provide a quick indoctrination to late night binging and all day carb loading.

Trips home for a little R&R can also disrupt your eating patterns. It seems parents and grandparents actually believe you are working so hard at school that you forget to eat, so they lovingly prepare all of your favorite foods during your visits and fill several shopping carts with more of the same to take back with you so you don’t starve on campus. These occasional retreats can create caloric snow
drifts that will not melt away with the spring thaw.

Food and Weather

Other barometers of campus life that can be blamed for the highs and lows in your weight include incompatibility issues with roommates, classmates, professors and significant others. Then there’s the persistent problem with cash-flow, chronic uncertainty about career goals and the endless aggravation of technology glitches. Unfortunately, just as there is no predicting the weather, downing a quart of lo mien every time you feel frustrated will not bring clear skies by morning, either. It will make you bloated, however. Worse yet is that even if you aren’t having a crisis, you’re likely to join in the food fix of those who surround you when they’re having one, which only increases your chances of an unexpected caloric downpour.

Food as Medicine

What all of these events have in common is that as your stress level rises, you’re turning to food for instant gratification. Eating under pressure, or as an escape from it, is not one of the lessons you can afford to earn with your degree. Life after college is also full of distractions, disappointments and deadlines. If your first response is to over eat, or to eat inappropriately, you will pay the price in added
pounds that are nearly impossible to subtract since there are more “bad hair” days than good in life.

And please take note: Any eating that is in response to a need or feeling other than hunger will get you into trouble. This means if you reach for some hummus and red peppers instead of cake frosting and vanilla wafers you're still consuming emotional calories, and they all show up on the scale as fat no matter how nutritious they are.

Another danger here is reinforcing the association between high pleasure (translation: “calorie”) foods with pain relief or reward. For most of us, this connection was first introduced when, at an early age, we were given an extra scoop of ice cream after enduring that nasty bee sting at the family picnic or got a jumbo order of fries for making the penalty kick in the sudden death to end a soccer game. While not a good precedent, the difference then was that someone else was in charge of deciding when you deserved a treat and when you did not.

For those who sustained a lot of childhood injuries under the watchful eyes overly empathetic parents or who managed to score game points when it really mattered, this Pavlovian response may be quite firmly set. But regardless of when you first made the link between food and fun or relief, or how often, it is now critical to take matters into your own hands since you control the pin to the ATM card.

Food for Sport

So how should you deal with all the curve balls tossed your way? Get out of the concession stands and take a walk around the bases. Venting your anger/aggravation/annoyance through physical activity is a far more effective way to regain your composure and maintain your weight than packing your face with cookie dough. Just close the books, shut down the computer, slam the door behind you and
jump on the elliptical machine. The time you spend sweating in the gym will be far more productive than anything you might have accomplished in that same hour stewing over your problems. Or stuffing them down with chocolate pudding.

Other Options

-Challenge your friends to an arm wrestling match

-Take out a jump rope and turn it red hot pepper

-Sign on to a Wii game station for a tennis match

-Run to the tallest building on campus and climb the stairs two-by-two

-Start a Dancing with the Stars contest

-Kick-boxing anyone?

The point is to recognize that semester cycles can have an impact on your appetite much like your menstrual cycle, so be sure you’ve got air in the tires of your bicycle!

******

Robyn Flipse, MS, RD

Author, Fighting the Freshman Fifteen

Available at www.FreshmanFifteenBook.com