Well, in my case it was really more like the freshman fifty.\u00a0 I’m not sure exactly how much I gained in my freshman year. I was trying to figure out college classes and the party atmosphere, and get to know people in my dorm. Connecticut raised the drinking age a year each year until it went from eighteen to twenty-one, but I was one of the lucky ones that turned the correct age right before the drinking age went up each year. My birthday is in September and I think the age went up each October.<\/p>\n
I lived in “The Jungle” or at least that was the nickname of the V-shaped housing that a lot of Freshmen and Sophomores called home. There were eleven buildings altogether, five on each side and then one that sat as the base of the V and housed the student cafeteria. There were over 1000 students living in the jungle, and probably closer to 1500. When I was going to school there, the package stores (liquor stores) would deliver to your dorm so there was a lot of partying going on. I was\u00a0never a drink until you fall down kind of person. I would have a couple of drinks, but I had a little bell that would go\u00a0off in my head and tell me that\u00a0if I didn’t stop I’d throw up. I always listened to that bell because there are few things in life that I hate\u00a0more than throwing up. That’s probably why I could never be bulimic, I just couldn’t force myself to throw\u00a0up.<\/p>\n
In my sophomore year, one\u00a0of the students that lived in my dorm thought it would be funny to put a poisonous plant in the salad bar and I’m one of the lucky dozen that ate it. I ended up in the infirmary and then in the middle of an investigation of the incident. The student was quickly identified and\u00a0arrested and kicked out of school. You’d think this would make me leery about eating in the cafeteria, but it\u00a0just\u00a0made me a little leery about eating salad.<\/p>\n
By my junior year, when I was a Resident Assistant, I weighed in at 232. I know this because my boss, the Hall Director, finally talked me into going on a diet. He said he’d done the same thing with his mom. She’d weighed herself each day and then at the end of the week she would turn in a sheet to him with the totals. He figured the accountability would help me. I was now in a different dorm; a move that came about as a result of my being hired as an RA, and this dorm had a pretty nice cafeteria. My boss was right that accountability would help. I still ate in the cafeteria, but I selected basic low calorie foods and the only alcohol I would allow myself was white wine, which was low in calories in comparison to other drinks. I didn’t drink a lot though because I had to maintain\u00a0a sense of authority in my\u00a0new position.<\/p>\n
I don’t remember the exact amount I lost, but I know I lost 65-75 pounds. I also know that the guy I was crazy about finally asked me on a date. Unfortunately, that was the only time, and I think he was talked into it by the other RA’s on staff who thought I deserved a treat for sticking to my diet and losing all that weight. But, I was destined to remain in the “friend zone” although we were very close. I had very low self-esteem when it came to guys and dating. I remember looking in the mirror in the dorm bathrooms and telling myself how ugly I was. Some of my friends were horrified to hear me talk like that, but no matter how they told me that I wasn’t I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Of course it probably didn’t help that I’d always been a “smart girl” and that as friendly as I was, I generally had no trouble telling a guy when I disagreed with his viewpoint on something, especially if his viewpoint conflicted with my firmly held beliefs about civil and women’s rights.<\/p>\n
I don’t remember how long it took me to put the weight back on, but I’m pretty sure that I was within twenty pounds of my previous high weight by the time I graduated the next year.\u00a0 It didn’t help that I had used my monthly payment to purchase a car so that I could do some internships in my senior year. It was great to be mobile, but I no longer had money to purchase much food on the weekends when the cafeteria was closed. So, I lived on mac and cheese and ramen noodles, two notoriously high fat foods.\u00a0I left school with a college degree and about 30-40 more pounds than I’d started with. But no problem…I had a degree, I was about to embark on my life.<\/p>\n
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Well, in my case it was really more like the freshman fifty.\u00a0 I’m not sure exactly how much I gained in my freshman year. I was trying to figure out college classes and the party atmosphere, and get to know… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodaddict.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}