Freshers' Week: how to stay fit amid all the partying, in three simple steps
Most students think staying healthy and enjoying university are mutually exclusive ambitions. I’m here to tell you this is a myth. It’s possible to do both. And it doesn’t take too much effort either, just three simple 'life hacks' can make a huge difference:
1. Calorie Switching
A recent study concluded that 60pc of university students gain weight in their first year alone, with the average gain coming in at around 7.5lbs!
The majority of weight gain is easily explained by a golden rule: if you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight.
So, if you are looking to reduce weight gain at uni, you should try to choose lower calorie alternatives for your food and drink choices. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to swap the pizza, ice cream and alcohol for spinach, coconut oil, and wheatgrass juice. There are plenty of alternatives that you can enjoy just as much, while having significantly fewer calories.
For example, if you like a Medium Classic Crust Original Cheese & Tomato Pizza from Domino's (1,160 calories), you can change to a Medium Thin Crust Original Low Fat Cheese & Tomato Pizza (848 calories). You will still be eating the same sized pizza whilst saving 312 calories.
Alternatively, swap Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough tub (1,150 calories) and to Oppo Colombian Chocolate and Hazelnut tub (420 calories) and save 720 calories!
It doesn’t just work for food; it also works for your beverage choices too. If you usually have four pints of larger (728 calories) on a night out, and you switch to four vodkas with Diet Coke (420 calories), you will save 308 calories each night. This will add up massively across your time at university.
It’s estimated that a 3,500-calorie surplus causes the average person to gain a pound of body weight. So, if you go out twice a week during your time at university, switching from lager to vodka will save you 66,528 calories in your three years – which is almost 20lbs of weight gain prevented, just by changing what you drink.
2. Build A Home Gym
When deadlines loom or hangovers kick in, a walk to the gym can feel as far away as Pluto. You tell yourself: “I’ll just skip this one work out” and before you know it, all those individual workouts skipped add up to plenty across an entire term.
You can prevent these excuses by building a mini gym in your room; it will come in handy on those days where you don’t have the time or energy to make it to your regular gym.
These four items will cost you less than £30, and make it much harder to skip a workout when all you need is one metre from your bed:
- Uni Rucksack (free) Fill up your uni rucksack with heaviest reading material from your course and you now have a weighted backpack for your workouts. You can do squats, push-ups, lunges and many other exercises with added intensity.
- Pull up bar (£10) Attach this to your door frame and you can do chin-ups and ab raises from your bedroom door.
- Resistance bands (£10) These bands work off the resistance you apply and give you the ability to do so many different exercises and work every muscle in your body.
- Virtual personal trainer (Free) You can even get a virtual personal trainer to join you in your home gym. Freeletics has a huge variety of workouts that you can do at home, and it takes into consideration your fitness levels so you will find a workout tailored to you.
Alternatively, if you like to run or cycle, download Strava. It will give you stats from your workouts like distance, pace, speed, calories burned and you can compete against your previous personal bests.
3. Create Accountability
Unfortunately, staying healthy also requires action, which is the hardest part when there are so many hedonistic distractions available.
Relying on willpower isn't enough as there will be days when the last thing you want to do is live a healthy lifestyle. Instead, work on habits that will hold you accountable to stay healthy even on days when you aren’t feeling motivated.
An easy accountability habit is to get a workout partner who will meet you at the gym. It’s much harder to skip on a workout when somebody is there waiting for you.
Try online tools like stickK.com that will hold you accountable. You state what your goals are (e.g. 'Go to the gym 4x per week' or 'Give up smoking' ) and put a set amount of money on the line (e.g. £10). If you didn’t do what you said you would do, it will take that money out of your account.
StickK plays on the cognitive bias of loss aversion – the theory that humans are more motivated by losses than gains. Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman has shown in his research that we feel pain from loss twice as much as we do pleasure from the equivalent gain.
You can further enhance this accountability by having the money go to a flatmate if you don’t reach your health goals that week. If that’s not enough, StickK enables you to go to the extreme and pick an ‘anti-charity’ to receive your money. For example, if you are a Manchester United fan, your money can go to Liverpool FC, or if you’re a Labour supporter, your tenner can go to the Conservative party (and vice versa), with those stakes on the line, failing your goals that week will not be an option.
George MacGill is the author of Uni Lifehacks: Insights From The UK's Most Successful Students
