Unhealthy Lifestyle: College and Weight Gain Writing

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Weight Gain in College
Introduction
College presents an unhealthy lifestyle to the students. While at college, each student is striving to achieve higher academic achievements or at least to perform above average so as to meet the minimum grade to proceed to another level. Also, the students are given a lot of assignments by the instructors. Besides, the learners have to spend a lot of time in the library preparing for the exam as well as researching in order to write the research papers. All these create tension that amounts to pressure and stress to the students. Additionally, college presents a wide range of food to the students ranging from a high carbohydrate to sugary food as well as high-fat content food collectively known as "comfort food." Stress, on its own, stimulates overeating. Stress can also stimulate the production of cortisol hormone which stimulates a desire for comfort food. Therefore, this paper argues that lack of time for physical exercises and all the stress college causes make the students gain more weight than anything else.
Lack of rigorous exercise leads to weight gain. Rigorous exercise helps in striking a balance in the body energy. This implies that the amount of energy intake is equivalent to the amount of energy output (Harring, Montgomery and Hardin 15)./doi/abs/10.1080/07448481.2010.483705. To achieve body energy balance, one has to equate the amount of calories taken and the physical exercises one engages in, that is energy utilization. College students do not have time to engage in physical exercises such as sports because of the workload given to them by the instructors, yet the students consume a lot of calories than they can be burnt during their undertaking of coursework activities (Jackson, Kirschbaum and Steptoe, 4). This means that their bodies will have more calories which are not used up. The body will convert these calories into fats and stored in adipose tissues. These fats accumulate consequently leading to weight gain.
Additionally, stress and pressure caused by the amount of workload make the students overeat. According to Olpin, Michael, and Margie Hesson (2015), a human body does whatever it feels like it needs to do when a certain degree of stress is reached. Pressure and stress such as the excitement caused by an examination paper excite the adrenaline levels in the body invoking the fight and flight mode (Olpin and Hesson, 45). Flight and fight mode prepares the body for self-defence or puts the body in a position to run away from the threatening situation. The body prepares by breaking down more glucose to release more energy for fight or flight. When more energy is broken down, the body will demand more food leading to overeating habit. Therefore, a college student is likely to develop this habit of overeating since he or she is constantly faced with the pressure and stress that ignites fight and flight mode (Pligt, Willcox and Hesketh 799).
Further, research shows that stress stimulates the production of cortisol hormone. Cortisol hormone falls in the class of steroid hormones which are produced from the cortex in the brain. Cortisol is produced when the body is confronted ...