Johnny McGibbon, a senior at the University of St. Thomas, wants to eat healthier, but says he can't.
"I live in an upperclassmen dorm that doesn't have a kitchen. For me, that feels like I've gone back 20 steps," said McGibbon, who is also a peer educator for the St. Paul university's Health Promotion Team. "So I don't have fresh produce I can store. So now it's going back to what's convenient — what can I make in two minutes in a microwave?"
Studies show that the "freshman 15" is a myth, but there is plenty of truth to college weight gain and the difficulties of living a healthy lifestyle in college.
The "freshman 15" commonly describes the weight that U.S. students put on in their first year of college. Originally, the phrase was the "freshman 10," reported in a New York Times story in 1981. But the number was "adjusted upward" to reflect Americans' creeping weight gain, according to a September 2014 article in Atlantic magazine.
A more realistic scenario is students gaining approximately 12 pounds during four years of college rather than 15 in the first year alone, according to a 2012 study at Auburn University in Alabama.
"There are plenty of interesting articles out there that looked at studies across long periods of time," said Dr. Katherine Lust, a nutritionist and the director of research at the University of Minnesota's Boynton Health Service. "What they find is that it is more the norm that first-year students will gain about 5 pounds."
Why do college freshmen gain weight? According to Lust, many students are on their own for the first time and must make nutritional and healthy lifestyle decisions without parental input.
"You don't have your parents saying 'eat your vegetables,' so when you get on a college campus, all of a sudden you have even more choices," Lust said.