The dreaded “freshman 15,” a term used for weight gained during the first year of college, may frighten new college students nationwide. But is this flabby phenomenon fact or fiction? That’s one of the goals of an ongoing study of freshmen at Brown University.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Richardson, a psychologist at Miriam Hospital in Providence and assistant professor at Brown Medical School, aims to uncover the “freshman 15” mystery through a five-year study.
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The National Institute of Health committed $750,000 to the psychologist’s research.
“The transition to young adulthood and college life and the newly found freedoms this brings can be a particularly stressful time,” Lloyd-Richardson said in a statement. “Being away from mom and dad for the first time combined with all-you-can-eat dining halls, busy class schedules and additional exposure to smoking and alcohol can easily allow freshmen to fall into unhealthy behavioral patterns.”
Two hundred Brown freshmen participated in the study last year, the first of a five-year research period. At the beginning, middle and end of the school years, the freshmen weigh in and complete questionnaires about their eating, drinking, exercise and other habits linked to weight gain. Students were paid $15 for the first two tests, and $30 for the third.
Beginning the second year of the study, Lloyd-Richardson has begun to draw hypotheses about the “freshman 15.”
One behavior associated with weight gain in freshmen is sleeping late, she said. Sleeping late leads students to take their first meal at around noon, eat again between 7 and 8 p.m., and have a third meal close to midnight. “In actuality,” she said, “they are fitting in an extra dinner and taking in extra calories that could be causing them to gain weight.”
Despite empirical evidence, there is little formal research linking alcohol consumption to weight gain in college freshmen.
“This will be the first study that will be able to correlate if increased alcohol consumption leads to weight gain in (students’) freshman year,” Lloyd-Richardson said. Her early research has found that some students eat less before consuming alcohol, either to reduce overall calorie intake or to enhance intoxication.
Students also tend to eat more unhealthy foods and exercise less after a night of heavy drinking. “A lot of students,” Lloyd-Richardson said, “will tell me: ‘All I want to eat when I have a hangover is a greasy cheeseburger, and that’s the only time I would be eating a greasy cheeseburger.’”
Some freshmen also like to go to dining halls with a group of friends, “social eating” that may lead students to consume more food than they would if alone. “They might be getting dragged along with their friends when they might not have eaten if they were alone,” Lloyd-Richardson noted.
National statistics, according to Lloyd-Richardson, show that a “significant” number of college students are overweight, and almost half are reportedly trying to shed fat through various methods. Smoking cigarettes is one method, particularly among young women, used to control weight gain.
Lloyd-Richardson, busy lately recruiting 400 freshmen at Brown to take part in the study this school year, said she hopes her work will eventually help prevent weight gain among this age group. But she has yet to draw any conclusions about the “freshman 15.”
“I’m not even convinced that there will be any weight gain,” she said. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”
Plans are to implement a weight gain prevention program in the fifth year of the study designed to steer Brown students away from the “freshman 15.”
