The Four Most Popular College Diets

Every day, for three months

Everybody likes to joke about how college kids are so broke and how they eat ramen all of the time. I personally haven’t stooped this low, but there are countless pour souls out there that are forced to resort to eating salted noodles for lunch and dinner each day. As I was eating my fifth quesadilla of the week, I realized that there are four main college diets that students follow. These diets are listed below.

The Cheeseburger-Pizza Diet

This is the infamous “Freshmen Fifteen” diet. At Mizzou there’s a special name for the weight that n00bs put on, which is known as the “Mizzou 22.” Over the course of one semester, 18 and 19-year-olds gorge themselves with whatever grease they can get their hands on.

The Cheeseburger-Pizza Diet is mostly made up of too many cheeseburgers and too many pizzas. I’m talking entire pizzas, not just a slice here and there. I know that the government now considers the tomato sauce in pizza as a vegetable, but something about eating an extra large meatlover’s pizza doesn’t exactly scream healthy.

Other facets of the diet include: sugary cereal and drinks for breakfast. Donuts at all times of the day. This diet is usually interrupted halfway through the semester when pizza and cheeseburgers are replaced by iceberg-lettuce salads floating in ranch dressing.

The Mass Quantity Diet

This is my most common diet. It consists of cooking up a bunch of the same food and eating it throughout the week. It can grow very boring, but it’s also incredibly efficient and saves time. If you’re a go-getter like I almost am, then you don’t have time to turn on the oven or put a pan on the stovetop a whole seven days a week. The best use of this diet is typically a grill or a crockpot, where you can just through a bunch of chicken, ground beef, pork chops, etc. into/onto your utility of choice and have meals for the rest of the week.

This diet can grow dull very quickly. Side effects include: not wanting to eat the same shit every day, eating out, and excessive vomiting (depending on how much food you cook and how long it takes you to eat all of it). The ramen noodle diet falls under this umbrella diet, because chances are if you’re eating one thing of ramen, you’ve got a lot more stashed away and ready to be eaten.

The “My Parents Are Rich” Diet

The “My Parents Are Rich” Diet almost exclusively consists of eating out for every meal. This is a diet followed by people who, you guessed it, have rich parents that don’t care what kind of food their kids are putting into their bodies. Chipotle five days a week? Sure, it’s good for your colon! How much money did you need again?

Oftentimes this diet is followed by veterans of the Cheeseburger-Pizza diet. These are people who care little to nothing about their bodies or their body image (except for those special few who have tremendous metabolisms) and will shove anything down their gullet so long as they have a cold beer to wash it down with.

The Apocalypse Diet

This is my personal favorite diet. It usually occurs only twice a month: halfway through and at the end, both just before paydays. The Apocalypse Diet is a potpourri of whatever the hell you still have in your pantry. This is the most desperate of diets – when both you and your wallet are thin from malnutrition.

There aren’t really any “typical” meals in The Apocalypse Diet, which is the beauty of the whole thing. What do you have left? Green beans and tortillas? Looks like it’s going to be a green bean taco tonight. A handful of rotini noodles and some Taco Bell hot sauce sounds pretty terrible, but it’s a gourmet meal at the end of the month.