5 Strategies for Dieting in College

If you're in college, and you're trying to diet, you don't need me to tell you that you've got your work cut out for you.  After all, it's one thing for me to suggest calorie ranges and macro-nutrient ratios for someone who has complete control over their food (i.e. most adults living on their own and not confined to getting their food from a dining commons).  It's another issue entirely for me to offer precise dieting protocols for someone who, quite frankly, has very little means to measure and control his/her food.

While not all colleges are the same, my college has a buffet style dining commons.  Moreover, the food selection is often limited (especially in terms of finding a satisfying meal that also happens to be healthy and nutritious).  What makes things worse, however, is that, in addition to an unsatisfactory variety of healthy food, I'm also constrained to an environment that prevents me from making quantifiable evaluations of my food (i.e. I can't guarantee an accurate portion size, and thus I can't accurately monitor my macro-nutrient ratios or my total caloric intake).

It would be incredibly easy for me to just say "screw it!"  After all, what viable options for diet control do I still have?

A lot, actually.

Here are 5 strategies to get you started -

1:  Be a Picky Eater!

Yes, you heard me!  Be picky about what you eat.  Picky eaters seem to have a much lower likelihood of having a higher BMI (though so long as they don't choose to only eat incredibly calorie dense junk food!).  Moreover, as a I've discussed in the past, food variety can have a significant impact on perceived hunger and satiety.  The more types of food you permit yourself to eat, generally speaking, the more food you will end of up eating in the long term.  

However, we can't just say "OK, so I'll just eat nothing pizza and ice cream at my dining commons!"

Bad idea.

2:  Be a Picky Eater (but be the weird kind that only wants to eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, & unprocessed meat)

I've also discussed in previous posts about food reward, and its potential implications for causing either spontaneous increases or decreases in our total energy consumption (depending on whether the foods we eat are hyper-rewarding or only moderately rewarding).  Eating foods high in protein, fiber, and water content (meats, fish, poultry, vegetables, fruit, etc.) will, in a sense, cause our homeostatic feed back systems to start wanting to defend a healthier/lower body fat set-point.  

In English, this means that if you eat mostly whole foods, and not processed junk, you'll likely lose fat.

3:  Keep a Food Journal

I said earlier that, at least in my situation, accurately measuring my food is not a viable option.  When this is the case (as it often is for most college students), we can still roughly keep tabs on how much we eat in a more qualitative sense.

For instance, today for dinner I made 3 total trips to my dining commons buffet.  The first time I went I got about a fist size serving of carved turkey breast and approximately 3x3oz scoops of plain white rice (the scoop I used was marked as 3oz, but I have no way of knowing if all the scoops I took were uniform).  For the second trip, I got some more turkey breast and rice (about the same amount), and for my third trip I got an apple and about 4 spoon fulls (each one a completely different size) of peanut butter.

I could try to transpose these food quantities to an online database, but ultimately, the calorie and macro nutrient ratios I would get would not likely be accurate.

So why do I keep track?

For starters, some evidence seems to show that keeping a food journal is correlated with (not necessarily causative of) better diet adherence and less over eating.  This makes sense.  I can't plead ignorance and tell myself "oh, I haven't eaten that much today," when I know, at least in a qualitative sense, that I actually did eat quite a bit.

Secondly I can use this food journal and compare my long term food choices and food quantities with...

4:  Keep Tabs on Your Body

As I was saying, you can cross reference your food journal with trends in your waist circumference and body weight (or just waist circumstance if you don't have access to a scale).  

In a sense, I actually like doing this better than counting calories because, very simply, a calorie count does not dictate whether or not you're losing or gaining weight.  Rather, your body mass will dictate whether or not you're gaining or losing weight. 

To put this in less complex terms:  Imagine that your body is like a bank account.  There's just one problem, though.  You can't accurately measure how much money you're making and spending.  All you have is a debit card, you don't the exact price of anything (though you might have a rough idea), and you only make a certain amount of money according to what your boss dictates, and he never tells you what specific tasks can earn you more or less money (though you might have a rough idea).  Some days you may spend more and make less.  Other days it may be the reverse.  You do, however, get a banking statement once per week that tells you what your current account balance is.  If your balance increased, you know you spent less money than you made.  If your balance decreased, you know you spent more money than you made.  If your balance stayed the same, you know you made the same amount that you spent.

While it would be incredibly inconvenient if this scenario was how a real job and financial situation worked out, this sort of inconvenience is exactly the type of thing we're dealing with in terms of our body's energy balance.  Even if we did count calories, or use some sort of BMR calculator with an activity multiplier, these numbers would only be guesses.  The only way to know for sure that our energy account (our stored fat) is decreasing in size is to actually keep tabs on it by tracking our waist circumference and weight (at the same time of the day, under the same or similar circumstances, once per week).

Once you're able to start noticing trends and correlations between your waist circumference, weight, the amount of average activity you perform, and the amount of food you eat in general, you will be better able to judge whether or not you need to eat less or more or neither.

5:  Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is another helpful tool you can use to lose weight if you don't really have the means to keep accurate tabs on your nutrition.  After all, if you need a caloric deficit to lose fat, there's no greater deficit than a complete deficit (i.e. not eating anything).

If you're at all concerned about whether intermittent fasting might be a harmful practice, be assured that I'm not promoting starvation dieting.

Moderate fasting (either a daily fast of 16-20 hours or a 24 hour fast every 3-4 days) seems to be a fairly harmless practice based on the evidence.  It does not appear to negatively impact your metabolism, nor does it cause you go into starvation mode and start cannibalizing your own muscle tissue.  Such things will only occur once your ability to mobilize your stored fat for oxidation has become insufficient to support your energy needs.

The more fat you have to lose, the more fat your body can mobilize to use for fuel.  Once you start getting lean, however, you may want to cut back a bit on the fasting, because, eventually, your fat mass will no longer be able to keep up with the demands of your deficit (but this really doesn't become much of an issue until you start approaching 6-8% body fat).

So What Are You Waiting For?!

So, if you're a college student and in a bind as to how you should go about doing a diet with your limited resources, give these 5 tips a try and see if you don't start making progress.

And don't forget to include an intelligently designed weight training routine (such as the one found here:  A Push/Pull/Legs Split That Will Make You Look Like a Man) in your plans for awsomeness!