Even though Starr doesn’t consider himself overweight, he is still trying to drop the extra pounds he gained this summer while working in an office.

“You’re sitting every day, you’re not moving,” he said. “There’s something called the office size because you’re just sitting there.”

Starr said returning to MSU made him more aware of his weight gain.

“For a lot of college students, you come back to school from the summer and look around and so many people are beautiful,” he said. “You feel bad if you don’t fit that persona.”

Weight conscious

Ronda Bokram, nutritionist at Olin Health Center, said there are many students like Starr at MSU.

According to the 2006 MSU Student Health Assessment, 39 percent of MSU students who are at a proper weight level said they were trying to lose weight.

“I see more students every year,” Bokram said. “It’s not getting better.”

It’s common for students to follow a specific diet or work out intensely with the hope of quickly dropping a couple pounds, she said.

Starr knows about such diets. He recently tried a diet consisting of just carrots and water, hoping it would speed up his weight loss.

The diet lasted two days.

“You feel very light because you have nothing in your stomach,” Starr said. “You have no energy. That’s when the lightbulb goes off and you say no more.”

Those types of diets are unhealthy because they often change the way students think about food, causing them to feel guilty if they stray from their goal, Bokram said. The diets can even cause students to relapse and binge eat.

“They’re fanatics about what they think they should eat,” she said. “If you eat potato chips you feel fat, if you eat carbs you feel fat. You don’t listen to your body, you try to manipulate it.”

An unreachable image

The media’s portrayal of body image affects the way society thinks about food, said Bradley Greenberg, MSU communication and telecommunication, information studies and media professor.

Greenberg, who has studied the way body image is presented in the media, said a majority of the women on TV and in magazines are unrepresentative of society as a whole.

“Women have been looking at the perfect body image since before they were teens,” Greenberg said. “The images become what are sought after.”

It has also led overweight men and women to be portrayed in a negative way.

“They are typically the object of humor rather than the creator,” he said. “They’re the butt of the jokes.”

Shattering the mold

Breaking that mindset in students is a struggle Bokram said she undertakes nearly every day.

But it takes time, requiring more than lessons on the food pyramid, the value of exercise and tips about the latest diet, Bokram said.

“You have to go through a whole history,” she said. “It’s very individual.”

That means uncovering some of the common myths about foods and examining how thought and emotion influences what people eat, Bokram said.

“People have different fears, whether it’s carbs, fat, or amount of food,” she said. “It’s hard to run into someone who says they eat anything they want.”

Bokram says she follows a philosophy that teaches intuitive eating. That method teaches people to recognize the difference between physical and emotional feelings and to change the way they think about food so they don’t feel guilty after eating something unhealthy, Bokram said.

Picking up the pieces

Getting students to that point is a task that MSU food science and human nutrition professor Sharon Hoerr is pursuing.

Hoerr is testing Project Web Health, an Internet program that teaches students how to follow a healthy lifestyle. After tests finish this year, it could expand and become available to more students, Hoerr said.

The program will accomplish that by giving students one interactive lesson on health and food each week, Hoerr said. The program also encourages students to set goals for themselves that include eating fruits and vegetables, having healthy snacks available and exercising.

A healthy lifestyle is what advertising freshman Emily Drake hopes the program teaches her.

At the request of her sister, a dietetics senior, Drake signed up for the program’s test which includes 10 online lessons covering topics such as body size perception, maintaining a healthy body weight and enhancing food variety.

“The lessons always give advice from other college students and professionals,” Drake said. “It’s not stuff I usually thought about.”

The program has helped Drake develop a plan for eating healthy and exercising. Twice a week, Drake dances at IM Sports-Circle as part of her workout routine.

She said she knows it’s important to plan ahead for meals and carry healthy snacks so she doesn’t splurge.

The project could help other college students lead a healthy lifestyle, Drake said.

“I think too many people are obsessed with looking a certain way and dieting based on what they see on MTV,” she said. “I think it will help a lot of college students not to be concerned with diets and overeating.”