After gaining the dreaded freshman 15, fad diets often promise students a quick and easy way to lose unwanted poundage, but they can also harm a student's physical and mental well-being.
Diet pills, the grapefruit, raw-food, meat-only, daily starvation, green tea and fruit juice diets are all methods used to quickly rid the body of excess weight.
The average freshman gains half a pound per week, which is 11 times more than the average 17 or 18-year old should gain, according to a Cornell University study conducted in 2003. It included 60 freshmen who were weighed at the beginning of the year and again 12 weeks later. The freshmen also completed questionnaires about their eating, sleeping and exercising habits.
In a college atmosphere that seems to encourage weight gain, it is easy to attempt to
lose weight by following crazy and unhealthy diets, said dietician Linda Hutchins, who is a consultant for the UNM Student Health Center and to UNM athletes.
Rarely do these diets help the student lose weight permanently, she said, adding they tend
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to last only until the person gets tired of them.
"Fad diets don't work," pre-med major Eve Rehfeldsaid. "It deprives the body of something you're used to having.ˇI was hungry, and all I could think about was eating."
Fad diets are also notorious for inconsistent weight loss and health risks.
"Diet pills speed up the heart rate and the nervous system causing a person to become more anxious and stressed, so you are stressing the body on top of losing weight," Hutchins said.
College students already have a stressful lifestyle, and the last thing they need is a stressful diet, she said.
Quick-fix diets also make it harder to lose weight naturally if used repeatedly. Fad diets tend to cause people to lose water weight first, then muscle tissue, which decreases people's ability to burn calories and slows their metabolism, Hutchins said.
"When someone follows a fad diet, weight loss may come quickly, but health does not," she said.
Hutchins said students might think they are losing weight when they are actually dehydrating themselves.
"As soon as they quit the diet, they will gain the water weight back right away," she said.
The Cornell study found breakfast and lunch all-you-can-eat dining facilities contribute to 20 percent of freshmen weight gain.
When confronted with the challenge of losing the freshman 15 or simply never gaining it, Hutchins said students should make healthy food choices a top priority.
She said it is especially hard for students to do this. Because of the chaotic college lifestyle, it is easy to forget to eat healthy.
The only safe and permanent way to lose weight is to develop healthy eating habits, she
said.
"The college lifestyle is hard to get used to," Rehfeld said. "You have to relearn how to be healthy because your family takes care of you pre-college."
