What I didn’t know about my changing self before my first year at college.
I should not be afraid of fruit snacks. No 19-year-old woman, or really any person for that matter, should be scared of fruit snacks.
And yet, there I was, standing in the Target aisle, reaching my grubby hands toward the Welch’s fruit snack box. A Mott’s and a Welch’s box danced between my grasp and the shelves in front of me, my mind repeating the numbers from the sides of the boxes to myself as a silent mantra.
45, 80, 45, 80, 45.
Calories hadn’t even been a thought that had entered my mind since my sophomore year chemistry class in high school, but after my first semester of college, calories occupied my mind 24 hours a day.
Flashback a few months to August 2020, the end of a summer stuck inside, and unlike most people, I was in the best shape of my life. Quarantine forced me to take extra-long outdoor walks just to escape my parents. So, when I moved into college and began taking my baby steps in my first apartment kitchen, the dreaded Freshman 15 was the furthest thing from my mind.
Of course, the Freshman 15 – the weight that students gain during their first year of college – was still drilled into my everyday conversations, with friends and the occasional older adult after they’d maybe had too much to drink.
“Don’t go and mess up your pretty figure,” a relative told me a few months before I moved into college. “Don’t let yourself go. It’s easy to do.”
The articles I searched after that interaction didn’t mention the one insight I could have used: that my relationship with my body in college was going to completely change. In fact, for all of my girlfriends in our first year of college, our bodies became unrecognizable to ourselves and to each other.
According to Healthline, more than 60% of students gain an average of 7.5 pounds during their first year of college, making that a faster pace of weight gain than the rest of the population. The rapid weight gain may come from total control over eating habits and more drinking during social events.
Some tips to avoid the Freshman 15 include staying finding ways to be active, limiting alcohol intake, and managing stress, Healthline reported.
About two months into my first year, I noticed that I looked nothing like the photo of myself from my high school graduation I had on my phone. So when my friends started discussing how they were dropping pounds by restricting calories and only eating healthy foods, I wanted in, too.
My MacBook screen veered from course assignments to Google search results for “How to lose weight” and “Why does my body look the way it does?” This turned into calorie counting, which turned into restricting me from the basic joys in life: peanut butter toast, butter, and fruit snacks.
Although tracking calories and over-exercising began to make changes in my body, it still wasn’t enough for me to feel comfortable in my body. I obsessed over needing to go to the gym and hated myself if I missed working out for even one day.
It wasn’t until I stood in that Target aisle, not letting myself buy a pack of fruit snacks simply because I wanted to, that I realized I was not living the life that I wanted to live. I left the Target aisle, went home, and did the most cliche thing I could have done.
A bathroom mirror, my body, and me. I’d done it nearly every night when I was eight, looking at myself and hoping, praying that my body would finally change and I’d receive the gift of boobs. What kind of a joke is it that I went from hoping my body would get bigger to one day praying it would get smaller?
I had always heard from online and the people around me that you’ll never be satisfied in life if you don’t like yourself. I thought to myself if I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror and find even one thing that I like, then I’d never get anywhere.
I plopped myself down and asked myself to do what all of the healthy therapists online asked me to do. What do I like about myself?
It wasn’t easy. It can be hard for a 19-year-old woman to find things she likes about herself, faced with constant pressure coming from every angle. But it’s not impossible.
From October 2020 to finals season at the end of my troubling first year, I forced myself to look for the good stuff. Even if I just chose my blue eyes on most of the hard days.
Having the ability to accept my body and the changes it will undergo over time adds valuable perspective: It makes bodies trivial, in a way. There’s so much more to me than my weight or the way my face shape looks on a certain day.
When I walk into the snack aisle at Target, I buy the damn fruit snacks.