By Jessica Booth
What if you continued to eat carbs and chocolate and still lost the weight you have gained since starting college? What if someone told you that you don’t have to spend hours at the gym or eat raw vegetables all day long in order to shed those annoying pounds?
Losing weight is much easier than pushing yourself through the latest trendy diet. This is the advice that Mireille Guiliano gives to college students in her essay on how to avoid and get rid of the dreaded “Freshman 15.”
“Don’t go on a diet, because diets don’t work,” says Guiliano. “Diets are about torture and deprivation. Your body is going to take revenge, and you are going to binge.”
Since writing her best-selling book, “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” Guiliano’s refreshing advice, that goes against any kind of diet, has been extremely helpful. She gives the same type of advice in her essay on the “Freshman 15.”
Guiliano has experienced first hand the pressure and stress that going to school can cause and the weight gain that can also go along with it. After her stay in America as an exchange student, Guiliano returned to France about 20 pounds heavier than she was before.
Intent on losing the weight, she started going back to her old French eating habits and listening to the advice her doctor gave. She quickly found that the weight was falling off, even though she wasn’t on a crash diet of any kind. It was thinking about this experience that inspired her to write her essay.
“College students now are pretty much in the same situation I was when I was young,” Guiliano says. “You have to study a lot, and you don’t really have the facilities always to cook your own meals. I think it’s very important when you study that you feel healthy and you eat healthy.”
Her advice is simple: “Eat mindfully and with pleasure, balancing your food, drink and exercise on a weekly basis.”
Guiliano strongly opposes depriving yourself of any kind of food, whether it be carbs, sweets or potato chips. “You can eat anything you want, just in moderation,” she says.
When you don’t eat what you are craving, you are more likely to binge later on, which will never give you the results you want. So, if you want something unhealthy, you can still have it-just make better choices.
For example, if you want chocolate, have a small piece of dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate. Not only is the dark chocolate just as satisfying, but it is more healthy and less fattening.
This is not to say you shouldn’t try eating some healthier foods. “If you’re hungry, you don’t always need to eat a candy bar,” says Guiliano. “You can eat an apple, some nuts, a little bit of hard cheese, some raw vegetables. You have a lot of alternatives.”
Along with portion control, Guiliano stresses the importance of eating slowly and enjoying your food. In her essay, Guiliano instructs students to “turn off the TV, put away the books and sit down at a table to eat.” The slower you eat, the less you will eat.
While exercising is an important part of any healthy lifestyle, Guiliano says that you do not have to be stuck inside a gym for hours in order to get it. Instead of sticking to the treadmill, you should try taking long walks or runs outside, where you can get fresh air. This kind of exercise is just as good for you and also cheaper.
Many students claim that they do not have enough time to concentrate on eating healthy. “It’s a poor excuse,” says Guiliano. “There are a lot of things one can’t control in life, but you can control your time. It’s a choice you have to make. You don’t have to spend four hours a day on it, but I think it’s very important to eat balanced meals, because your body needs the energy.”
Guiliano says that the biggest reasons students gain the “Freshman 15” are that they are eating at the wrong times, snacking too much and don’t have enough healthy choices in the school cafeteria. She urges students to make the best choices they can.
“If your campus and cafeteria have too much junk food, you pay for it, so you should put pressure on them to have more healthy foods,” Guiliano says.
Instead of going on just another diet, you are making a lifestyle change.
“The problem with diets is they are one size fits all,” says Guiliano.
By eating in moderation, making healthier choices and enjoying your food, you will see a big difference in your weight. In a world full of crazy diet advice, it may seem surprising, but it really can be just that simple.