Victoria is a student at Eastern Michigan University and today she happens to be sitting in her room studying for a test. It’s very late at night and she gets hungry, so she calls up Benito’s and manages to finish a whole pizza by herself.

Victoria then wakes up the next morning and has no idea why all those workouts have done nothing for her gut.

That very same Thursday night, John is at a frat party and is on his tenth beer. The last thing on John’s mind is there are 150 calories per beer and he has already consumed 1500 of the 2000 calories he needs per day in the last three hours.

John will later go to Double Eagle and eat himself into a coma. Meanwhile, the last chance he ever had for exercise violently died as his friend’s Xbox got the “Red Ring of Death,” giving him no reason to get out of bed and go downstairs for the next 12 weeks.

Yes, I said it! EMU is the 7th fattest college campus in United States of America, according to research carried out by The Princeton Review. But rather than just criticizing the status quo, here are a few reasons things became so bad.

No. 1 is partying. Liquor and beer are nothing but pure calories. There are 150 calories in an average beer and 65 calories in an ounce of liquor, without chaser; 16 ounces of liquor is 1040 calories. Compare a 16-ounce can to how many shots you take when you and a few friends buy a bottle, and you start to get some idea of how many calories you consume every night you go out drinking. The people who go out drinking three to four nights a week are really in a bind when it comes to their calorie intake.

Second is diet and exercise. There are many people on EMU’s campus who do exercise regularly, but they must also consider diet. People who exercise every other day can eat and drink all their progress away during the course of that same week. What you eat can be as much a part of getting fit as the act of exercising itself.

The third and final tip for today, however strange it sounds, is to eat. Most people skip vital meals throughout the day, unbalancing their metabolism. Find time to eat something for every meal and eat foods like apples and raw vegetables between meals to keep you from binge eating when you finally do get around to eating a meal.

Remember there are many teachers at EMU who can give you a wealth of health and diet tips, so do not forget to use them. That is what they are here for.