The freshmen 15 myth has generated a lot of buzz over the last couple of years. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Freshman 15 myth, it is said that a college student will gain 15 pounds over the course of their first year while attending school. This causes a lot of panic in students because they don’t want to gain wright and with fear that the freshman 15 will happen to them. Sometimes this causes students to alter their eating and exercise habits to prevent this from happening, and at times this can be detrimental to their health. Graham and Jones set out to see if this myth had any truth to it with their study “Freshman 15 : Valid Theory or Harmful Myth” and came up with a consuls base doff of their result, but I do not find this to be reliable.
The first thing the researchers did was raw a sample that was representative of the population of the small Mid-western liberal arts college. During the first two week, the researcher’s collected 153 completed surveys on eating attitudes out of the 175 freshmen. They all gave them consent forms that allowed the researchers to obtain their previous medical history. The researchers then wet to student health services and were able to obtain weight and body fat information of 81 of the 153 students. At the end of the participants first year of college, they were instructed to return to the student health center and measured their body fat and weight and asked them to complete another survey about their dietary habits. The researchers were able to obtain complete data on 49 of the 81 individuals. Their results showed no significant change from the beginning to the end of freshmen year, the average change in weight loss was 1.5 pounds, and the average .36% loss in body fat. The researchers also found out that many of their subjects had prior knowledge about the Freshman 15 weight gain myth. Twenty-nine percent of the participants were heavily concerned they were going to gain weigh over the course of their first year in college. Graham and Jones did find that the participants that had a fear of gaining weight had a higher perceived weight gain. This study therefore concluded that the Freshmen 15 rumor was indeed a myth.
Though the researchers were able to draw a reasonable conclusion from their data, I do not find this to be very reliable. There are many weaknesses with the way this was executed. Firstly, the main source of communication between the participants and the researchers was the questionnaire. What the participants answered in the questionnaire had to be taken as truth. They could have lied about all of their dietary habits and skewed results. Also there were not different variables being tested to show what happened in different situations. The researchers should have had the participants keep something daily to track their eating and exercise habits. And lastly, this study was done at a little Mid-western college where most of the study body is female. This is not representative of every college and university.
This study is very relevant to the students at UNC. Being a first year student myself, I had heard so much different information about gaining weight. Almost everyone on campus knows about the freshman 15 myth and is nervous it may happen to them. But after a couple of months on campus, all the students realize that this was something created out of the fears of college students. There are ample opportunities for students to gain weight amidst all of the ordering out, late night visits, social events, and dinning-hall runs during class change. Everything seems to work itself out to the point that nobody’s weight has drastically changed from the beginning to the en d of freshmen year.
Works cited
Graham, Melody A., and Amy L. Jones. "Freshman 15: Valid Theory Or Harmful Myth?." Journal Of American College Health 50.4 (2002): 171. Academic Search Complete. Web.
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