After losing 60 pounds through extreme weight loss methods my freshman year of college, I had trouble keeping off the weight. Struggling to find a healthy balance between diet, exercise, work and school, I decided to seek out the resources available to students on campus. I ended up having to do more searching than I would have liked, but I found advice through students in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Nutritional Sciences Program. Here’s what I learned.

MEETING THE NUTRITION STUDENT

“Why don’t you explain to me what you eat in a typical day,” Elena Dan, a graduate student pursing her master’s in interdisciplinary nutrition sciences prodded me after we sat down to talk about healthy weight loss. I stalled for a second, trying to remember what I had eaten just that morning.

“Toast in the morning, Subway for lunch, and usually teriyaki for dinner,” I said. “Sometimes pizza. It depends on what’s being ordered by everyone else at work.”

The last part of my answer prompted another inquiry from Dan.

“How often are you preparing your own food?” she queried.

I searched my thoughts. The last thing I had made for myself was a sandwich over the weekend.

“Not very often,” was my response. “I’m never home enough to have the time.”

With that statement, I had just highlighted one of the biggest problems surrounding my diet that was stopping me from getting proper nutrition: environment.

“You have to shape your environment to where you’re not constantly tempted,” Dan explained, “Right now, your environment doesn’t allow you a lot of options.”

The environment dilemma that Dan highlighted is seen all too often at the collegiate level. Students live in dorms where food preparation options are scarce and, while eating healthy doesn’t always have to be costly, it is usually more time-consuming in the midst of work and classes. So, students end up eating out or eating food that is readily available to them.

The problem is that eating out leads to overeating because the portions are usually oversized, and one can never be sure how the food was prepared.

So Dan worked with me to set a goal: Prepare at least one meal for myself each day, something as simple as packing a sandwich for lunch.

“Just by doing that little bit, you’ll be able to control your calorie consumption a lot more,” Dan said.

After going over my diet for a few more minutes, Dan pointed out several other key problems.

“I can tell you right away that you’re missing out on vegetables,” she noted. “What is true is that you need something from all of the food groups.”

Dan drew a circle on a sheet of paper and divided it into a half and two quarters and told me to draw what a typical plate of food for me might look like. I drew a plate of food from University Teriyaki: half of the plate chicken, one-quarter rice, one-quarter salad.

“Let me show you what that plate should look like,” Dan said as she redrew a circle next to it, only in place of the chicken, she drew vegetables and fruit, in place of the salad, she drew protein, and in place of the rice, she drew whole grains.

“What most nutrition specialists will tell you is that you have to look at overall diet,” she explained. “Always being low on energy or always feeling cold, or even bad skin and nails, can all be caused by nutrient deficiency.”

In order to lose weight, one must burn more calories than they take in, but when I lost my weight freshman year, eating fewer calories than I burned didn’t mean I was being healthy.

“Because you were depriving your body, you probably decreased your serotonin level, which affected you mood,” Dan explained.

She again stressed the importance of making sure my diet was balanced, adding that I needed to make sure I ate at as regular of an interval as possible.

“A more regulated food intake will help you make healthier choices when you need to eat,” she said.

Using the Web site mypyramid.gov, Dan calculated a calorie intake chart for me based off of my goal weight of 185 pounds. We found out that, based on my activity level, I should be consuming about 2,400 calories a day. She also broke down the calories in my current diet. While my diet may have been highly deficient in certain areas, I was actually pretty close to the numbers of calories I should be consuming.

So why wasn’t I losing weight as fast as I wanted to? Dan explained one of the reasons.

“You have to do it in a slow way,” Dan said. “Healthy weight loss is only one to two pounds per week.”

Armed with a more acute awareness of how what I eat is affecting my body — and with a plan to improve — I set out to the IMA.

“Weight loss is about diet and exercise,” Dan told me at the beginning of the meeting, “always these components.”

It was time to focus on the latter of the two, and with a meeting set up with a personal trainer, I was ready to find out how to get the most of my workout.

Read tomorrow’s lifestyles piece as Editor-in-Chief Casey Smith goes through a personalized training session at the IMA and learns that getting the most out of your workout isn’t as simple as jumping on a treadmill.

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