Featured Authors Oz '08 updates dorm diet

The author: Oz, who struggled with her weight as a teenager, originally wrote this book during her freshman and sophomore years of college and ended up losing 20 pounds at Princeton. Since graduating, she has blogged for The Huffington Post and Oprah.com and is a speaker on health, diet, and wellness issues facing teens and young adults.

 

The book: Oz shares her own teenage struggle with weight and offers a strategy for how to eat healthy and stay fit at college. She outlines exercise plans (and workouts that can be completed in a dorm room), provides advice on vitamins and supplements, and gives tips on how to handle common pitfalls of college eating (like unhealthy snacking while studying). Two new chapters in this updated version cover “conscious eating,” which explains how food choices affect the environment, and recipes that easily can be prepared in dorm rooms or dorm kitchens.

Opening lines: “Imagine you’re a freshman at Fat U. You pummel the alarm clock as it sounds the end of a not-so-restful night’s sleep, thanks to the pizza you shared with your roommate at midnight. Groggily, you find your way to the bathroom, cautiously peer into the mirror, and find your face is a mass of dark circles, puffy eyes, and zits. You go through your face-cleaning regimen, applying harsh chemicals to your troubled skin. Because this process takes so long, you don’t have time for a good breakfast, and you run out of the dorm, frazzled and starving. The fact that your belly is hanging over the pants that used to be your ‘fat jeans’ doesn’t improve matters any. ‘How did I get myself into this mess?!’ you wonder, unwrapping a half-crushed candy bar you find at the bottom of your purse.”

 

Review: Publishers Weekly wrote (about the original 2006 edition): “This is a great book to pack between the extra-long twin sheets and study lamp.”