Sara Kaner knows what it’s like to struggle with her weight.
“I never weighed myself,” Kaner said. “I didn’t want to know.”
The 21-year-old UF public relations senior played two sports in high school in addition to constant workouts. Her mother even cooked for her.
When she came to college and had to schedule her own workouts and eat on a meal plan, her weight gradually increased.
A new program is starting to help students like Kaner. Kristen Medina, a doctoral student in clinical and health psychology, has started a new weight gain prevention program in the UF Weight Management Lab as her dissertation.
She said the program’s purpose is to help students develop better eating and exercising habits. She got the idea when one of the girls in the Weight Management Lab did a similar study.
Medina will find about 150 undergraduate freshmen, sophomores and juniors to participate in the program. The free program will last about 10 weeks, but participants must be full-time students.
She is also trying to recruit about 10 research assistants trained in weight management to help her with the program.
The program already has some student responses.
“Every research project has its own challenges,” Medina said. “We will just wait and see.”
Medina has worked on similar projects with adults in rural communities, which the lab mainly focuses on. She said she is trying to tailor this new program to college students.
“We’re trying to make it applicable to their lifestyle,” she said.
Dorothy Berry, a 20-year-old UF zoology sophomore, said she didn’t gain weight when she got to college — she lost it.
Despite that, Berry said she knows several people who gained a significant amount of weight. She thinks the program is a great idea.
Berry said she believes a lot of people rely on their parents for nutritional value. When people come to college and have so many unhealthy options, it’s easy to gain weight, she said.
Or, as 19-year-old Zachary Sorrentino said, “It’s definitely the beer.”
The UF physics sophomore said his roommates drink alcohol frequently, and the calorie count adds up.
He said the program is an interesting idea, but he doesn’t know how it will get students to exercise besides running and biking.
