Today, you probably saw a few too many girls eating celery for lunch and Rand’s oh-so-delicious Vegetarian Vegetable soup for dinner. This entire week, you should plan on getting to the Rec early, because ellipticals will never be open and classes (especially Hardcore) will fill up quickly. And in case you were in the market for some Krylon white primer, you can forget about shopping for it within a 25 mile radius- just to save you the trip, it’s gone.
But why all of these strange phenomena?
Because this weekend is formal, and for a reason mostly based on Facebook photos, it turns every girl on campus into a food-deprived, cooler-painting maniac.
It’s a sad thing to look around in Rand and see all of the girls with piles of lettuce and water on their trays. It happens to even the most sane of us- if everyone else is dieting for formal, then surely we should too! It doesn’t matter how hard we work out or how little we care about our dates. If a girl plans on getting tagged in Facebook photos this weekend, then chances are, she won’t be eating this week.
But again… why? Why can’t we just be satisfied with our bodies as they are? Why do we try and starve ourselves when that only causes our bodies to backfire and retain fat, instead of lose it?
Formal is supposed to be fun. You go with a date (oftentimes someone that you’re interested in) and all of your friends to a beach in Florida, where you get to be silly and raucuous for three whole days. It’s like a Vandy tailgate weekend on steroids.
Yet we continue to treat it as an excuse to crash diet and work out excessively. By the time we’ve lost three pounds of water weight and approximately $100 at Frugal’s, we aren’t even in the mood to have fun. Quite honestly, the last thing your date wants is to hang out with a crabby girl who hasn’t eaten anything substantial in days. You might look a teensy weensy bit skinnier, but chances are, your date would rather hang out with the old you, the one he asked to formal in the first place.
But a lot of you don’t even care about your dates- you’re going with a friend or a random set-up to whom you have no sexual attraction. So why bother dieting? Here, it all comes back to the Facebook pictures.
We attach so much meaning to these pictures we get tagged in after the fact that we forget to have fun in the moment. Your body might look hot in your formal pics if you’ve been dieting for weeks, but how will your face look? Probably lined with stress and worry on what should be one of the most stress-free weekends of your life.
When you look back at your Facebook pictures in a couple of months, especially when you’re bronze from the summer sun and most likely a little skinnier (because everyone loses weight in the summer), you’re going to wish you had enjoyed every second of formal. There’s no harm in cutting back on carbs and spending a few extra minutes in the gym this week- you don’t want to feel bloated on the beach. But don’t deprive yourself of the things you enjoy and do NOT starve yourself. This will only hurt you, both now and in the future.
In short, dieting to the maximum this week is just not worth the pain. Your body looks tonight how it will look on Saturday, so deal with it and start getting excited about the amazing weekend ahead of you!