College: The real best four years of your life. Pursuing your dream career in a university that practically feels like it's an entirely different world comes with it's inevitable disadvantages: student loans, feeling just a little bit homesick, and gaining 10-15 pounds.
The devastating freshmen 15 is commonly constituted as the average first-year-student's worst nightmare. Thousands of articles have been dedicated to "beating and defeating" the "dangerous" phenomenon of gaining weight that is, in total fairness, easily avoidable. The hype is understandable. I mean, in the ridiculously vapid and excessively vain world of 2016, where the Kardashians dominate news outlets and pregnant women with six packs gain national attention, what could possibly be worse than putting on a few pounds?
But I'm here to tell you that not only should you accept the experience of going up a jean size, you should embrace it. I know, I know, I can already hear the critics shaming me for promoting the unhealthiness that can possibly be related to stress eating and can definitely lead to heart disease and diabetes. Jocks I went to high school with are in the process of forwarding this article to their friends with the caption, "She's such a fat*ss." Hear me out.
Like your newfound coffee addiction, your very first all-nighter, and the first sip of (gross, watered down) keg beer that you have in a frat basement, the freshmen 15 is a rite of passage. Granted, these things aren't for everybody, but they're part of the standard college experience. They're part of the memories you make that come with working your ass off to get a degree, meeting the best friends of your entire life, and discovering who you are as a misguided and confused 18 or 19 or 20-something-year-old in the process.
Never again will you be able to have regular, impromptu 2-o'clock-in-the-morning trips to Insomnia cookies or drink four nights out of the week and still pull Dean's List grades. And that's probably for the best. College is the designated time in your life to eat leftover pizza for breakfast and dance on graffitied tables to Fetty Wap songs until one of your heels breaks.
It's not meant for drinking lemon water and meal planning and hitting the gym every day for the sake of maintaining washboard abs and toned arms. It's meant for Pop Tarts and fruit snacks counting as a balanced lunch and walking across campus to meet your friends for a study session counting as cardio. It's meant for drinking-because you aced a test, or because you failed a test, or because it's Tuesday. Essentially, the purpose of undergrad isn't to make all of the right decisions; it's to make all of the wrong ones, learning as you go.
If you go on my Instagram, you won't find a picture of me in a bikini, or of my #TransformationTuesday weight loss journey, or a single picture of any kind of meal involving a fruit or vegetable. Instead, you'll find pictures where I'm ecstatically laughing next to my best friends, or squeezing in a booth with eight people in front of a table filled with (fourteen) half priced appetizers from Applebees, or smiling as I have an iced coffee in one hand, a cookie the size of my face in the other, trying to finish a research paper at a desk covered in scribbled notes. And isn't that what this time in my life is all about?! I have the rest of my life to go to Pilates four times a week and blast social media with progress pictures of my #booty.
So embrace the weight that comes with all of the beautiful things the first year of college entails. Yeah, your high school friends will probably judge you when you see them again, but they were going to do that anyway.
