Core Training

What Caused My College Softball Weight Gain

By Sara Moulton

Posted on March 2, 2017

It’s no secret that I have lost a significant amount of weight since I ended my college career in the spring of 2014. 70 pounds to be exact. When I entered my freshman year of college in the fall of 2010, I weighed 175 pounds. When I left college four years later I weighed 221.5 pounds. Right after my college season concluded, I embarked on a new journey to Chicago to compete in the National Pro Fastpitch League. I got the chance to compete against the best and most athletic players in the game of softball, and I felt like an outcast because of my weight.

How did I let myself get to 221.5 pounds? It’s hard to wrap my brain around that haunting number because I once saw it at my feet when I stepped onto the scale. That number will forever be branded in my mind and I vow to myself to never see it again.

I have decided to write a series of posts about my college weight gain journey because I feel as though other college softball players may go through the same thing. College is like being in a completely new world. For the first time in my life, I was on my own for four years without any parent supervision. I noticed my biggest weight gain happened between my junior and senior year. I started taking harder classes in my major and set my individual pitching goals a little higher. Being a type A personality, I put way too much pressure on myself to succeed. Because I was so focused on everything else, I completely neglected my health and nutrition.

I gained my weight because of several different factors. I was able to narrow the factors down to the five key ones that played the biggest role in my weight gain.

1. Riding a Moped Everywhere: In the fall of my sophomore year, I decided to copy the rest of my teammates and purchased a moped as my form of transportation to get around campus. Riding a moped was awesome, I got to places in half the time that it took me to get to them my freshman year- when I was forced to walk everywhere. The downfall to riding a moped everywhere was that I stopped walking and was constantly sitting. I sat on my couch at my apartment, then I sat on my moped on my way to class, then I sat in class, and in another class and another class. I was always sitting. The only exercise or movement my body received was from softball practice, weights, and conditioning which could only take place for four hours a day. I spent all of those other hours sitting or sleeping.

2. Eating Out: It didn’t take long after arriving on the college campus my freshmen year for me to realize that I didn’t know how to cook, nor did I have any interest in cooking. Cooking and preparing meals for myself took too much time and energy in my mind. My freshman year I relied on the cafeteria food in the dorms next to my apartment. My sophomore year I moved into an apartment in Dinky Town, which was located next to a street full of Fast Food restaurants. It was so much easier grabbing breakfast from Brugger’s Bagels on my way to class, Pot Belly’s for lunch, and something incredibly unhealthy such as Five Guys burgers, Chinese food, or Mesa pizza for dinner. I probably ate out two or even three times a day when I was on campus. When we traveled for trips in the spring, I was eating out a solid three meals a day. This definitely played a major role in my weight gain.

3. Staying Up Too Late: I didn’t appreciate sleep in college as much as I do now. When I was in college I would stay up super late at night studying, watching TV, hanging out with teammates, or in the fall going to parties late into the evening. On the nights I went to parties I would end the night with a breakfast burrito from Qdoba, another hot spot for me located in the Dinky Town Fast Food web. On the nights I spent at my apartment studying I would always be nibbling or snacking on something to entertain me. If I had the opportunity to sleep in the following day, I would take full advantage of it and sleep until 11:00 am or noon. I would skip breakfast and go right to lunch foods. Lunch calories are always going to be more than breakfast calories. I also rarely ate breakfast, even on the days our team had morning practice or weights. I wasn’t hungry in the mornings because I ate so late at night that my body never had time to digest my dinner or my snacks from the night before.

4. Stress Eating: The stress eating started around my junior year when I started taking harder classes related to my Business major. Once you start stress eating, it can be almost impossible to stop. Eating made me feel comfortable and relaxed. That was a mental state that I wanted to be in rather than frantic and razzled. This mindset carried over to softball too. Whenever I felt nervous for a game I would eat something to calm my mind. Before every travel trip I would stop at the CVS on campus and load up my backpack with Hershey Drop chocolates, licorice, and other candy I could snack on throughout the trip. I snacked 99% of the time because I was stressed, nervous, or bored. I would snack whether I was hungry or not because it put my mind at ease.

5. Judgment: When I was gaining weight, I didn’t care what anyone else thought. I had people try to talk to me about my eating and lifestyle habits out of genuine concern while I was in college. I even tried to go see a nutritionist my senior year because I was unhappy with the way my clothes didn’t fit anymore and I was the biggest person on my team. Whenever someone tried to reach out and offer their advice I saw it as judgment. It made me angry and sad which caused me to retract and eat more and more. Weight is a very sensitive subject for young women, especially for someone who has a strong Type A personality and wants to succeed in everything. I knew I had a problem with my weight, hearing it from others made it twice as hard to deal with.

I gained roughly 45-50 pounds while I was a D1 college athlete. Some of the weight gain was muscle but 95% of the weight gain was because of the way I ate and the lifestyle I lived. I wanted this post to focus on the reasons for why I gained weight in college. Since leaving college three years ago, I have lost 70 pounds. I am finally ready to open up and tell my real story. My future posts will focus on the differences between my college eating on the road versus my Pro career eating routine– where I lost much of my weight. I will also share secrets that I learned about calories, nutrition, and softball, and a post on how I lost a total of 70 pounds and have been able to keep it off.

Next post: How to Eat on the Road

 

Gopher Softball Images by: Michael Kyllo-Kittleson

Chicago Bandit Cover Image by: Dina Kwit