I wanted to get fit and healthy while staying on a college campus

I wanted to get fit and healthy while staying on a college campus

Posted: 9/9/08

While most students were getting a head start on that freshman fifteen, I spent my summer trying to achieve the almost unachievable.

This is no easy task, as many RU-Newark residents know, healthy living isn’t exactly synonymous with the college lifestyle. Student life is full of stress, sitting on you butt trying to beat the latest 70-hour game and eating Funions as a meal. Funions are not a meal they are a cry for help.

I was no different; I was actually the pudgy poster child of the sedimentary lifestyle that plagues most college students.

As I reached the twilight of my undergraduate career something dawned on me, I didn’t gain the freshman 15, for me it was more like the freshman 130. I was a cheese doddle away from washing myself with a rag on a stick. Something needed to be done -something drastic, but something inexpensive.

If my pockets were as fat as I was, I would have no problem; unfortunately, I was the broke college student trying to get by on a minimum wage job. My empty bank account was not all I had in common with the average college student.

« College students aren’t thinking of being healthy, » says Dr. Sandra Samuels, MD, Medical Director of the Rutgers Newark Health Center,  » and that’s the problem. »

Getting Fit For FREE at Rutgers

According to a 2007 study at the university of New Hampshire out of 800 students at least one-third were overweight or obese, 8 percent of men had metabolic syndrome, 60 percent of men had high blood pressure, and more than two-thirds of women were not meeting their nutritional needs for iron or calcium. Continuer la lecture de « I wanted to get fit and healthy while staying on a college campus »