Though many young women dread gaining weight during their freshman year of college, gaining weight is actually very common during this time for both men and women. In most cases, people do not even understand how it happens to them let alone what to do about it.
The weight gain comes due to a change of lifestyle, which may just be an imbalance of diet and exercise. Before we look into how to stay fit in college and even after, it is ideal to discuss the challenges that make staying fit in college a difficult adventure.
Staying Fit In College Challenges
Limited Financial Resources
This is arguably the biggest challenge to staying in shape in college. With a limited budget and daily access to fast foods, it becomes a challenge for students to consistently eat right.
Usually, the best way to go about this is to learn how to cook and eat fresh fruits and veggies and snacking on nuts between meals since they are a good source of energy.
No Time For Workouts
Faced with little or no time, there is always a need to be a little bit more creative. Without creativity, most students find it difficult to spare any time for exercise.
The most important thing to do in this scenario would be to wake up early, walk more and drive less, revamp your daily rituals and squeeze short walks in the course of the day.
Low Self-Esteem
The number 3 challenge to staying fit in college is being too self-conscious about how you look.
Since you cannot avoid the crowd around you, it is time to remind yourself that you are working out to improve your cardiovascular health and focus on the strength you gain from routine workouts.
How To Stay Fit In College Tips
Plan Well
Planning well is a sure way of ensuring that you hold yourself accountable. However, this is the most difficult part of being a college freshman. When planning, the key is to identify the goals and activities that would make you stay fit and ensure you follow the plan.
Just the way you would not afford to miss an appointment with your physician or professor, make your workouts and fitness schedule appointments of equal measure. Planning your day before it is even there helps to avoid excuses.
While it may be difficult to have a whole month's activity plan, the key to staying fit in college is proper planning. Moreover, planning helps you to strike a fair balance between exercise, diet, studying, working, sleeping, and relaxing.
Get Enough Rest And Sleep
Most students stay up late at night studying, partying, or just telling stories. For your information, sleeping less than four and a half hours or more than nine hours a night could result in increased body weight.
Sleep duration directly affects hunger regulating hormones while stimulating appetite. Again, studies indicate that recurrent deprivation of sleep increases your appetite for foods with high calorie content. Moreover, lack of sleep limits physical activity and leads to fatigue.
Make It Enjoyable
Staying fit in college is a goal achievable through thousands of activities. While some are definitely fun, most of them look like punishments.
Therefore, the easiest way to make the commitment to stay fit and in good shape is to engage in activities that are simple, fun, and enjoyable. You could start from simple runs or team sports and later get to more demanding exercises if need be.
The idea is to start small and simple while maintaining a wider scope.
Find The Right Friends
Surrounding yourself with friends who have similar goals to yours is a key step towards staying in shape. Supportive friends make your goal much easier to achieve.
In addition, if both of you are into fitness, it is more fun to push your workouts further, maintain a healthy diet, and share your achievements.
Maintain A Healthy Diet
This remains one of the most difficult things for college goers when trying to stay in shape. While dieting is broad and may require several precautions, you can always maintain a healthy diet without putting in a lot of money.
The principles of healthy dieting include knowing the right portion size, varying your meals, maintaining a healthy breakfast and snacks, drinking enough water, limiting junk food, avoiding starving, indulging only occasionally, and maintaining daily servings of fruits and veggies.
Exercise
Good diet without exercising may not have the best of results, and vice versa. While most people view exercising as tiresome, stressful, and energy consuming, exercising can be a simple and fun part of your routine.
For starters, it is advisable to go for stretches, walk to class, go bike riding, or play a favorite sport.
In addition, if you are clueless about what to do, you can get a gym membership where experts will advise and train you in the best exercising techniques as you enjoy amazing fitness courses.
With time, you can try intensive exercises such as making runs and lifting weights, among others.
Moderate Alcohol, Sugary, And Caffeinated Beverages
Students are notorious for partying. Well, in as much as it is all fun, you can still enjoy your night outs without taking in the calories in beer. Moreover, moderating your alcohol intake helps you to avoid negative effects such as hangovers and fatigue.
Sugary and caffeinated beverages do not fill you up but add a lot of weight, and are also detrimental to your overall well being and health, hence the need to moderate.
How To Stay Fit In College Conclusion
Your success at staying fit in college lies on your ability to successfully balance between healthy diet, exercise, maintaining good mental health, and keeping up good relationships and peers.
Essentially, this helps you to adapt to a healthy lifestyle in college and in easily maintaining the lifestyle after school is over. While it comes with a myriad of challenges, keeping fit in college is very achievable.
Overcoming the above challenges and observing the above tips are a guarantee to success. Finally, don’t push yourself too much. Overdoing any of the above can result in boredom, depression, or injuries.
