Gaining weight is something most college students must face at one point or another. However, during the pandemic, it seems the rest of the world has joined in our struggles with weight gain. If you have found that you have packed on a few extra pounds or that all the clothes you bought before quarantine either don’t fit or only fit with extreme force, just know that you are not alone.

It is safe to assume that when most of us were forced to remain at home for months at a time that it became hard to find the motivation or space to exercise and all too easy to hit the order button on SkipTheDishes. You would think that with how much food I have ordered off that app that they would have offered me a partnership by now. It is not a surprise that this has become a problem for many of us because when our routines are disrupted and our boredom increases along with our stress levels, that snacking and over-eating would occur. Especially for those of us who use food as a reward system. Food is known to give us an amino acid called tryptophan, that converts into serotonin in the brain. This is when some of us who are struggling with mental health or low moods during very stressful times, turn to food to make us feel better.

The “freshman 15” is a well-known occurrence in college students. When students are thrust into higher education and expected to manage their own schedules with limited time to work for funds and more time spent on harder workloads, it becomes harder to eat healthy and exercise. We are not financially able to buy a full grocery list of ingredients for a healthy dinner and often opt to ordering take-out that can last a few days or cheaper, unhealthier options for convenience.  Eating healthy and exercising also proved to become an even bigger challenge when everything became online. Those of us who started to work or study from home now had to set up home offices or find creative ways to create a good learning environment for themselves rather than building up a home gym. Exercising became a very low thing on our list of priorities, either from lack of time to be able to exercise on our at-home yoga mats, not having access to a gym or from the lack of motivation to get off our couch to do anything but reach for snacks. I was guilty of this as my only form of exercise for months was walking up and down the stairs of my house, to and from the fridge. For many of us, it was hard enough to maintain our mental health and sanity, let alone a healthy eating and workout habit.

Even if you were able to control yourself from the temptation of ordering take-out food, without the daily on-the-go routine we had before, eating home cooked meal would not be as beneficial if you didn’t actually leave the couch. Many people tried to keep active, even if they were not working out, by going on daily walks. But if you struggled with your mental health and social deficiency, you know that some days just getting yourself out of bed was all you could manage and usually that would warrant me an award in the form of a tasty treat. I found that even though my eating habits had decreased in the months before Covid happened, during my first year of college, I was still able to maintain my physical health purely from all the walking I would have to do from one class to another. However, as that turned into just closing one computer tab and opening another and sitting in the same spot in the corner of my room for up to 10 hours a day, my physical health hit an all-time low.

Even as we look forward to the reopening of gyms, some of us find jobs and other forms to keep us active when the pandemic starts to dwindle away, we will still have to face the repercussions of stuffing our faces at 2am at every night when our schedules were turned upside down. That can feel really daunting and out of reach so it’s important to take things one step at a time. Once our mental stability improves and we begin to live out our normal routines again, other aspects of our wellbeing that were comprised will follow suit. I don’t feel open to the idea of having to leave my house for work or school anymore because it felt all too easy to roll over in bed and be able to do those things from the comfort of my secluded room. However, what now feels foreign and hard to me will become my new normal again and we will adjust again just like we were forced to do a year ago.