Interestingly enough, college cafeteria food cured me of my thinness, to a degree. I basically kept up my picky eating through Senior yea of high school; basically, i had lost my appreciation of food. I eventually got over wanting a turkey sandwhich with lunch or chicken cutlets for dinner, but i had never really picked a favourite meal that i could replace them with. I didn’t enjoy eating anymore. I entered college a very thin boy. And, while i found myself rather attractive in that flat-chested supermodel way, no one else really was interested in me past asking me if i had weight problems.
That changed rather soon, all thanks to cafeteria food. Much in the same way that i can’t resist conquering things that i can easily conquer (a-hem, no need to give examples, eh?), i cannot resist what i percieve to be a free meal. And, having already paid in full for my meal plan, every meal seemed free. I ate eggs or waffles every day for all of my first term, and usually had dinner every night before rehearsal. This didn’t show up on my body during that term (waist-size for tailoring the fall play: 26″), but by the end of a similarly scheduled winter term it had started to. By spring term i had broke my favourite corduroy pants wide open and nearly did the same thing to my favourite pair of vinyl before taking pity on them and giving them to a (female) friend. It turns out i had put on over twenty pounds. 20lbs!!
Of course, it also turned out that all i was eating was carbs and dairy (pasta, pizza, cheese hoagies, waffles, cereal), which meant the weight didn’t actually distribute itself so much as collect in flabby pockets. Well, obviously not flabby (i wasn’t exactly breaking the scale) so much as pudgy, but either way it wasn’t the tone that i sorta used to have. I wasn’t especially pleased, but i liked feeling filled out so i just dealt with it.