Poor sleep may spur college weight gain
November 14, 2015 2:56 PM   Subscribe

As the first semester of the school year reaches the halfway mark, countless college freshmen are becoming aware that their clothes are feeling rather snug. While the so-called freshman 15 may be hyperbole, studies confirm that many students do put on five to 10 pounds during that first year away from home. Now new research suggests that an underlying cause for the weight gain may be the students’ widely vacillating patterns of sleep.
posted by sciatrix (37 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
As someone who just graduated from college, I honestly get so pissed off when I read these articles. Who has time to sleep when your tuition has increased nearly 1000% and we regularly have to work two jobs on top of an internship while getting grades in stupid quarter system cycles, while we don't get the healthcare or mental health care we need? As a 1st year, how do you get used to any of this?

Do some research on how to convince my Chancellor to change the fundamental scheduling of the system, or our President who is patently bizarre and still unqualified for the job. I should probably start writing my long-delayed editorials about how bizarre it was to attend a Tier 1 university and feel incredibly underserved by the end of it.
posted by yueliang at 3:00 PM on November 14, 2015 [12 favorites]


Yeah, I dunno, I think the dining halls with unlimited Froot Loops and ice cream might have something to do with it. My eating habits were atrocious when I was in college, and the environment really encourages a lot of junk food consumption.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 3:07 PM on November 14, 2015 [9 favorites]


I was working three jobs and trying to overload my credits to graduate early with less debt, I remember not sleeping nearly enough but also not being able to eat enough (both for being broke and because work and class never left me time during the hours the dining facilities were open). I was barely 120 pounds, being 6'1", when I came home for my first Thanksgiving and my girlfriend freaked out when she hugged me.

I would have loved to have the luxury to have some kind of "oops partied too much slept too little" weight gain but that's so far from my concept of college life it seems like a #privilegeproblem.
posted by trackofalljades at 3:07 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I taught an "Intro to College" course for several years and had my students keep time logs for a week, and I hate to say this, but a lot of them weren't overextended and sleep deprived because they were working a lot of hours or studying really hard. Some of them were, but many of them were spending a lot of time watching Netflix and playing video games. And yeah, my students were not getting nearly enough sleep. They probably averaged seven and a half hours, but a lot of that was that they sleep-binged on weekends.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:28 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


ME: Now, I wonder where they performed this study?
ARTICLE: Brown University.
ME: Ah.

This is one of those cases where the results and/or the reasons behind them will absolutely be skewed by the research site. Students at a ritzy private university tend to have different funding and living options available to them than students at, say, a regional comprehensive like the one I teach at (where many students skew slightly older and already have families, and most need to work at least part-time to supplement loans and grants). The level of pressure may also be different--certainly, students at the U of Chicago, where I went to grad school, prided themselves on experiencing levels of school-related stress that the faculty at UCI, where I went to undergrad, would have considered cause for real worry. TL;DR: nothing at an R1 (student experiences, the teaching, the research expectations, the campus culture...) can be generalized particularly well to any environment that is not an R1.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:42 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think self-regulation of sleep and nutrition is a bit of a crisis that extends beyond just college. Stimulaton and junk food are so widely available, and time to regularly cook nutritious meals is scarce. Evenings seem to evaporate. Sleep is equally frenetic. Whether it's due to the number of hours we're working or the number of hours we're watching Netflix (or the number of hours we're watching Netflix to decompress after a long day), it's really hard to maintain a balanced lifestyle. That's my experience, anyway.

On the one hand, it feels like a #firstworldproblem, but on the other hand I think it's something we should be talking about before the crisis deepens even further.
posted by mantecol at 3:44 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I never had any trouble sleeping in college. Nor did I have any problem ordering cheeseburgers at inappropriate times after I'd already had dinner because, hey, cheeseburger.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:46 PM on November 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


Maybe we're just designed to get fat and die. Seems more likely than all these ever-changing theories that would keep us so busy sleeping and working out and steaming vegetables that we would do nothing else.
posted by easter queen at 3:47 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Mmm, yeah, I didn't think the article was necessarily trying to say that the poor sleep schedules on behalf of the students was because of partying--just that students weren't good at managing their time to prioritize regular sleep yet. Which, having spent my fall semester managing fifty freshmen, is... completely accurate. They're not necessarily partying or having fun in their spare time, but they are not good at planning their time out in advance yet.
posted by sciatrix at 3:48 PM on November 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Also, yes, life at an R1 is like a contest to see who can go insane first. Not surprising it has deleterious health effects as well. (I know people at my R1 played video games occasionally but I was always amazed that they had the time.)
posted by easter queen at 3:48 PM on November 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


I think the dining halls with unlimited Froot Loops and ice cream might have something to do with it.

Many dining halls (in fact, all the dining halls where my Freshman attends college) have healthy food options along with unlimited access to cookies, soft serve ice cream, etc. I think the problem may be that incoming students don't have the self-discipline to limit their intake of junk food - or an appreciation for healthy food - or both. Growing up is all about learning how to make good choices - even in the dining hall.
posted by kbar1 at 3:54 PM on November 14, 2015


In the mid-90's (and I assume this is still true) people new to work at Microsoft made reference to the Microsoft 15, the 15 pounds you would gain after working there. This could be due to sleep schedule issues, but I assume it was due to the unlimited soft drinks that were available.

I wonder if googlers have weight gain, given their access to free food.
posted by el io at 3:59 PM on November 14, 2015


Metafilter: In the mid-90's (and I assume this is still true)
posted by Xavier Xavier at 4:00 PM on November 14, 2015 [29 favorites]


The food service company that serviced my college solved the all you can eat dinner food problem by having food no one wanted to eat. I skipped dinners for an entire year except the occasional bowl of white rice and spinach from there, and still gained weight. Though that may have been as much from lack of exercise as much as lack of sleep.
posted by Zalzidrax at 4:10 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Maybe we're just designed to get fat and die

no, we're just not designed to do whatever it is we're doing for 50+h a week, whether it's work or school or both at once. it's just fucking bad for us but there is no end in sight.
posted by poffin boffin at 4:19 PM on November 14, 2015 [15 favorites]


We didn't have cheesestick delivery, but I fondly remember the option to use your dining plan for late-night meals. It was a lovely study break. Great for a night owl like me, because waking up for breakfast is hard. (Still hard, 15 years later).

And personally, although I did in fact gain some # of pounds my freshman year, it wasn't like my high school sleeping schedule was all that great either. The internet had been invented, and before that there were books. Plus I woke up at 5 am for swim practice. I think the hour long nap I routinely took during biology was critical to my survival in high school. (If anything in college I got more sleep, because I could, and did, make the decision to skip class if I was too tired to benefit.)

Of course this is coming from a woman in her mid thirties-- who in fact accidentally stayed up all night last night working on a project. (If I gained 15 lbs for every year of awful sleep schedule, I would weight more than twice what I do. )
posted by nat at 4:23 PM on November 14, 2015


We're not designed for anything.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 4:28 PM on November 14, 2015 [7 favorites]


I agree, sciatrix - I think it's not uncommon to have trouble negotiating the transition from a super-regimented high school life to one where you suddenly need to self-organize everything. I basically didn't figure out how to do that until graduate school. (ok, who am I kidding, I still haven't figured it out)

Since this study took place at Brown, I also wonder how this interfaces with a weird aspect of some student cultures, where there's a lot of social pressure to throw yourself into unpaid student-run extracurricular activities (e.g., theater, performing arts, campus newspapers, etc.) -- not just for recreation, but actually to the point where you are expected by your peers to treat them as a first priority even over classwork. I don't know if Brown is like this, but I know other Ivies can be. I think there's a sort of cultural meme there that treats 1. building social connections between students that can be used for later networking, and 2. getting evidence of soft skills on your resume that you can bill as leadership/organization experience, as both more potentially valuable than doing impressive work in the classroom. Plus, of course, a lot of the students who organize (and participate in) these activities are super-type-A and very socially aggressive and adept.

Anyway, taking time away from sleep is often viewed as evidence of being a good team player, and when you're a first year student not only might you be more eager to please, you also may not have a lot of practice setting healthy boundaries and detecting "sick systems" and bad management.
posted by en forme de poire at 4:32 PM on November 14, 2015 [7 favorites]


(more potentially valuable in terms of future career after graduation, I mean)
posted by en forme de poire at 4:33 PM on November 14, 2015


I ate much less at school than I had at home -- because there was no way I could have gotten away with it; the non-student dining hall workers were rolling their eyes at me as it was.

And I didn't doubt my roommate and the other boys on my floor would have had more to say about it than I wanted to hear if I'd tried to have my accustomed box of sugar cubes on the nightstand and basket of caramels on the floor of my dorm room.

But I didn't lose weight, maybe because the dorm was always so hot I could barely stand to be in there.
posted by jamjam at 5:01 PM on November 14, 2015


I lost like 45 pounds in my first two years of college but I didn't live on campus or have a meal plan so most of that was my living on ramen noodles. By my junior year I was weighing in at about 155 pounds on my 6'2" frame which was not really a great look.
posted by octothorpe at 5:20 PM on November 14, 2015


I lost a bunch of weight when I started college because I started hormonal birth control and it made me sick. And also in a misguided attempt to save money I started living on spinach and York Peppermint Patties. I'd spent high school living on 5 hours of sleep a night or less, owing to a lengthy bus commute, so I was also that rare college student that started getting way more sleep when I moved into the dorms. Being able to roll out of bed and into class was an incredible change of pace for me.

The "Google 15" is definitely a thing people talk about gaining. But lots of people lose weight when they start at Google because the food is so much healthier than the programmer chow they're used to eating, and they only have to walk like 50 feet to get to a well equipped gym.
posted by town of cats at 5:21 PM on November 14, 2015


If I gained weight every time I exhibited bad sleep or food choices in college, I would have at least three moons orbiting me.

Probably named Oliverio's Cheese Sticks, talk.bizarre and Netrek by astronomers.
posted by delfin at 5:22 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Beer.
posted by parki at 5:42 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lots of calories are consumed during binge drinking.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:03 PM on November 14, 2015


A lot are also expelled, if you do it right.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 7:12 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I recently saw a photograph taken during my first year of college. You could count every rib. I didn't gain 15 pounds that year, but I did sometime between then and about 23, and I was much healthier for it. College is when a lot of people's metabolisms start to shift from adolescence to adulthood, so even without the poor sleep and unlimited dining halls some weight gain is going to be normal.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:35 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Many dining halls (in fact, all the dining halls where my Freshman attends college) have healthy food options along with unlimited access to cookies, soft serve ice cream, etc. I think the problem may be that incoming students don't have the self-discipline to limit their intake of junk food - or an appreciation for healthy food - or both. Growing up is all about learning how to make good choices - even in the dining hall.

I mean, okay, but I'm a decade past my freshman year in college and I would still eat all that crap if I ate from an all you can eat buffet for every meal. I don't eat it now because I don't buy it and don't bring it into my life in the first place, but you can bet that if someone puts a cookie and a carrot in front of me I'll eat the cookie every time and I'll probably do that when I'm 80, too.

I didn't eat healthier in college until I moved out of the forms and was allowed to get off the meal plan (and I saved sooo much money too, those things aren't cheap).
posted by geegollygosh at 7:46 PM on November 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sleep issues in college for me were exacerbated by fucking white frat bros scream chapelle show lines across the quad at 3 am every night. It was as if they were executing some shitbird mating call designed to prevent me from sleeping so hard that my seizure disorder was triggered to a massive degree.
posted by Ferreous at 7:56 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


...in a misguided attempt to save money I started living on spinach and York Peppermint Patties.

With me it was living on Coca-Cola and Three Musketeers bars. And I’d use my leftover lunch money to buy record albums (this was a while ago). I didn’t gain much weight, but my teeth still greatly regret that diet.
posted by LeLiLo at 8:11 PM on November 14, 2015


A return to my college habits and variable sleep times in the past year has corresponded with exactly this, just like in college, so I'm not super surprised. Though I feel like I have a few confounding factors (huge ongoing life event–triggered stress, ongoing corticosteroid use).

So that's interesting, but I'm more interested in how to fix it. This would seem to suggest that normalizing sleeping hours would help. I'm working on it...
posted by limeonaire at 8:51 PM on November 14, 2015


I lived on wax beans, rice and butterscotch pudding.

I slept pretty well until I transferred to the aforementioned R1, where I promptly lost my mind.
posted by easter queen at 1:53 PM on November 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


Out from under my parents' watchful eyes, I was like a tiger let loose in a monkey cage eating everything in sight with no judgment other than my pants cutting off my circulation. I binge ate all my roommates food (which I replaced as I mowed through it), but I'm certain she hated each for it. College was the point at which my compulsive eating problem really took root. Sleep was never the problem.
posted by cecic at 7:48 PM on November 15, 2015


I look forward to the follow-up study, "Do R1 universities support environments that cause deletrious effects on your health?" Looking for a yeeeeeeees
posted by yueliang at 4:49 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


R1 Studies 2015 Nov;48(2): 11057
Do R1 Universities Support Environments That Cause Deleterious Effects On Your Health?
Abstract
Get back to work.
[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
posted by en forme de poire at 8:27 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


does that count as a publication for your cv because if so I have some furious typing to do
posted by sciatrix at 8:28 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


oh my god MAYBE, CITE IT A LOT JUST IN CASE
posted by en forme de poire at 8:30 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


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