Stepping onto campus my freshman year, I weighed 260 lbs. At only 5 feet 10 inches tall, I was overweight — borderline obese.

I knew nothing about diet and exercise; I only knew that I wanted to lose weight to start my college career with a fresh outlook.

Six months later, I weighed 60 lbs less.

People are always asking me how I lost the weight, but the truth is, I don’t have a good answer for them.

My weight-loss methods were extreme. I would cut calorie consumption to as low as 800 calories per day while trying to maintain a workout schedule that kept me in the gym five days a week. This schedule caused me to pass out twice my freshman year, once on the treadmill and another time in my dorm room. With the little knowledge that I had about proper weight loss, I assumed this pattern to be the norm, but after I sat down and talked to

nutrition and fitness experts, I found out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“You were essentially starving your body and putting it into survival mode,” said Elena Dan, a student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Nutritional Sciences. “Every body wants to survive.”Dan further explained that I was actually slowing my metabolism, which was entirely counterproductive to my goals, and that I could have caused long-term harm to my body. I was going about the weight-loss process all wrong.

A day with a personal trainer at the IMA and an hour to sit down and chat with Dan and a few other students in the nutritional sciences program helped set me in the right direction.

Weight loss is all about “diet and exercise, always these two components,” Dan told me. So, I began with the diet portion and attempted to seek out information about proper nutrition on campus.

Searching for resources

What I immediately found was that information and resources on campus regarding health and nutrition were hard to come by. I knew that ASUW sponsors a healthy-body-image fashion show and highlights National Eating Disorder Awareness Week in the spring, but what about other parts of the year?

After talking to administrators at the IMA, Hall Health Primary Care Center and the UW’s Health and Wellness Center, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for in terms of one-on-one nutrition counseling on campus. After some searching, however, I found a program online called UHELP — University Health Education Leadership Program.

According to its Web site, UHELP offers seminars through volunteer students known as peer health educators (PHE). The PHE are “trained to conduct a variety of health promotion activities to residence halls, Greek Houses, Classes, FIGs or any other organized group on campus on any of our 11 presentations.”

While 11 presentations are advertised, only eight are listed online, one of which is Dawg Bites, a seminar addressing nutrition and healthy eating.

I was surprised that after multiple inquiries, including one to the very office that houses UHELP, no one had thought to refer me to this group. I asked Mark Shaw, director of health promotion at Hall Health, why no one I talked to seemed to know of the program.

“I think what happens sometimes is there might be a presumption of a clinical need, so the prevention or outreach may not have come to mind,” Shaw explained.

Shaw estimated that UHELP presents to about 3,000 students a year; the problem is that they depend on FIG leaders, RAs or house presidents to plan for the seminar that is right for their groups. This does not always happen, not to mention that commuter and off-campus students are typically left out of the process.

“Our challenge is knowing who to contact,” Shaw said. “We’re always looking for ways to interact with students in a better way … we’re maybe only reaching 12 percent of the campus population right now, which is a problem.”

Teresa Tran, a PHE and marketing team leader through UHELP, echoed Shaw’s sentiments.

“Most of our advertising is done through word of mouth,” Tran said. “But we’re trying to get away from that and get up more signage around campus.”

Even after looking over UHELP’s curriculum and talking to a PHE, I still hadn’t found someone I could sit down and talk with who was knowledgeable about proper nutrition and weight loss.

Luckily, I found a tremendous resource available in the knowledge set of other UW students studying nutritional sciences.

Within a day of contacting the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program of Nutritional Sciences in Raitt Hall, I received responses from several students, all eager to sit down and talk with me about proper nutrition. One of them was Dan; another was Julianne Gibson, a member of an RSO called the UW Food Group whose purpose is to “promote and raise awareness of nutrition to the University of Washington campus and the greater Seattle area.” Gibson also edits a quarterly newsletter entitled Food for Thought. I asked her what she could tell me about resources available to students looking for nutrition advice or counseling on campus.

“I’m embarrassed to say that I actually don’t know,” said Gibson, a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University (SPU). Gibson explained that, at SPU, there was more publicity of eating-disorder awareness and health-body image education in general. She noted that part of this reason may have been because of the higher female-to-male ratio at SPU.

Gibson expressed dissatisfaction with the availability of resources at the UW.

“I’m a little disappointed that, as somebody who’s studying nutrition, I don’t have a clear sense of what the resources [available to students] are,” she said.

Dan, who sat down to give me a private consult, also noted that the UW is different from the schools she has previously attended when it comes to available resources. Dan previously attended California State University, Northridge, and said that peer nutrition counselors were available free to students on campus.

“Part of this, I think, is because the UW does not have an undergrad program in nutrition,” Dan explained. “Usually, it’s the undergraduates who are required to do peer counseling.”

Even though Dan and Gibson aren’t required to do peer counseling, they were more than willing to talk with me, and I sat down with Dan for a nutritional consultation.

Read The Daily tomorrow for Casey Smith’s nutritional consultation.

Reach Editor-in-Chief Casey Smith at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.