50 Top Weight Loss Tips for College Students

When I visit college campuses, I can’t help but notice that an alarming number of students are overweight. In fact, I just read a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that stated that a third of college students are overweight. If your jeans don’t fit at age 20, I hate think how much your waist band will stretch by age 30 or 40.

I think freshmen are especially susceptible to weight gain in college – Freshman 15 – because of all the food that’s available round the clock for the first time in their lives.

I wrote a post this week for my college blog at CBSMoneyWatch that contains 50 weight loss tips for college students. I’m sharing 10 of the weight loss tips here and you can find the rest at:

50 Weight Loss Tips for College Students

1. Don’t use a cafeteria tray – you can pile too much food on it. Only eat what you can carry to the table with your own two hands.
2. Avoid the cafeteria’s self-serve ice cream. A Dairy Queen self-serve ice cream cone is 280 calories.
3. Avoid yogurt toppings. A medium scoop of yogurt is 113 calorie, but that doesn’t include all the brownie chunks, sprinkles, gloppy fruit sauce and M&M’s that college students dump on it.
4. Stop binge drinking. Five 8-ounce margaritas equal up to 2,500 calories. Five 12-ounce beers equal up to 800 calories. Five shots of liquor add up to 1,000 calories.
5. Don’t play Beer Pong, Flip Cup and other drinking games — you’ll drink more than you think.
6. Post this warning on your dorm mini fridge: To loose one pound of weight, you must burn 3,500 calories more than you consume.
7. Don’t eat anything straight out of a bag or carton.
8. Avoid dorm vending machines. You don’t need a Kit Kat bar at 1 a.m.
9. Visit Rachel & Ramen for healthy cooking tips from a student attending College of William & Mary.
10. Start a food journal and write down everything you eat.

Here’s where you can find the rest of the weight loss tips.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com and US News & World Report. Follow her on Twitter.