Posted on January 31, 2012

Wait! First, check out the previous “freshman 15” articles to find even more great weight loss tips!
 
Apart from requiring an inconvenient mid-year new clothing investment, weight gain can be a health burden. Earlier, we talked about ways to add physical activity to your day, and avoid emotional and situational factors that tend towards calorie imbalance. Here we’ll discuss some more factors to avoid and some actions to take.
 
College offers opportunities for great achievement and great failure, both academically and socially, with concomitant stress. Numerous temptations to relieve the tension of studying and dating with snacks, high calorie drinks, and late-night pizza runs spell disaster for the waistline.
 
Problem: The choices of eateries
 
College towns seem to attract the best and the worst of fooderies, and manifold food pitfalls for the unwary freshman. The corporate greaseburgers places are often the best-financed and closest to prime campus real estate. These places issue a siren song for weary students.
 
As an example, take Penn State in the center of Pennsylvania. This enormous campus IS the community, which had virtually no identity before the college was established.
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Posted on January 26, 2012

That first batch of extra poundage is devilishly difficult to shed, and may accompany you the rest of your life. Check out the first article on the topic and read on for more wight control tips.
 
Since obesity is such a health hazard, how can you avoid this unwelcome addition to your body? Moreover, why does it happen? Knowing why something occurs is a major accomplishment, and forewarned is forearmed.
 
Problem: Isolation from home
 
College takes kids away from home in ways that they have not usually experienced before. Even commuter students are likely to be gone from home more than in secondary school. This causes all sorts of potential problems, and being aware of them may help you to prevent negative results.
 
Suggestion:
 
To counteract this unaccustomed disconnection from one’s usual routine, make active attempts to keep a regular schedule for meals, and try to include familiar homemade foods whenever you can. If you are a commuter student, try packing at least a partial lunch from home or your dormitory refrigerator. This way you are not completely dependent on truck eateries (mobile food vendors), fast food places, and the college cafeteria.
 
It is certainly true that you can make friends during mealtimes in all these common eating spaces. You don’t want to miss such opportunities. Therefore, you want to retain a reason and excuse to socialize with your schoolmates. Many cafeterias will allow diners to eat some of their own food as long as they have made a token purchase. If your chums are getting their lunch from the food trucks, you can all sit together to eat whatever you have bought or brought.
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Posted on January 25, 2012

Have you ever had a situation when you are preparing to travel abroad, or for an important meeting with a business client from another country? I’m sure you have encountered at least one of the two. You are planning your trip, and realize that the language barrier might be a real problem. What should you do? Where should you go? Time is scarce and you don’t actually need to learn that much stuff, just some of the basics to help you manage daily life.
 
There is a solution for your problem. It’s called Imendi.com – it’s an online set of flash cards and tests, which offer you the basic foreign language learning experience. The service is pretty simple and at the same time helpful. For it to work, however, you have to be determined, and possess a great desire to learn the language. Read more

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Posted on January 24, 2012

It has become almost axiomatic that students will gain a substantial amount of weight in the first semester or two or three of college. The reasons are manifold, and the prevention is not easy.
 
However, self-awareness is a very good beginning strategy for preventing and correcting problems. We will look at some causes of collegiate weight gain and suggest some adaptive strategies in this and future articles.
 
First, most high schools still require some sort of physical education , whether it is a several-times weekly PE class with dreaded dodge ball games and calisthenics, or interscholastic sports that take kids other schools to compete in a variety of sports. In most high schools with a college preparatory orientation, one way or another, there is physical activity built in to the week, at least in the USA.
 
College, with some exceptions, generally does not require any such physical activity. There are exceptions, of course. Columbia University requires that their graduates be able to swim, but this is rather unusual. This means that the caloric consumption that might have kept you in metabolic balance in high school is inappropriate in college. Unless you cut way back on intake, there is an inevitable result – weight gain.
 
Second, exercise at college often feels like a waste of time unless one is there on a sports scholarship. Although not true of every student, it is a sentiment often heard regretfully expressed. Colleges sometimes seem schizophrenic in their attitude and practices with regard to this issue.
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Posted on January 19, 2012

Getting a college degree is a major investment of both time and money, and it would reassure hard-pressed families and students to have some assurance that their education was going to prove useful.
 
We talked in earlier articles about finding practical courses in the ivory tower, and seeking training in state colleges, community colleges, and commercial schools, for the health and computing fields. These ideas continue below.
 
Another direction to take in terms of instantly practical skills is the food service industry. The Culinary Institute of America, in the beautiful Hudson Valley of New York State, or the Napa Valley of California, and the Restaurant School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania both offer highly professional training that prepares students to work in any food related setting.
 
Students run restaurants inside the school that are destinations for diners from their whole regions. In the case of the Restaurant School, the design, theme, and menu of the student-run restaurant changes every few weeks, to give students a chance to participate in the process of creating a new restaurant concept on their own.
 
Both these institutions offer non-credit courses that introduce enthusiastic amateurs to the hot and steamy world of the restaurant kitchen. There are local cooking schools in most areas, and many community colleges offer this training as well. Will taking one or two courses in omelet-making or wine-matching ready you for a real job? The likelihood is that they won’t but restaurants are generally run by idiosyncratic entrepreneurs, and one never knows what will strike a restaurateur positively when hiring.
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