Rabbit Food

In college when I was trying to make weight, I would eat what my friends would call "rabbit food"--raw vegetables, Fiber One cereal, and whole grain bran muffins.  It is pretty hilarious when I look back now, but at the time, my rabbit food was very serious.  Crew was very serious, and not making weight was simply unacceptable.  At the time, I really lacked the maturity and mindset to make weight without developing poor eating habits, such as going through cycles of binging and starving.  In the end, I could only make weight by crash dieting, and dehydration worked to shed the last few pounds.

For my birthday the year I was trying to make weight for the Head of the Charles, my roommate gave me a cake made of "rabbit food."

"Rabbit food" cake

This is how I spent my junior year in college.  Picture a 100 person lecture hall with a professor standing in the front of the room, droning on in his heavy foreign accent about some upper division mechanical engineering concept--heat transfer to be specific.  I am wearing my crew sweats and slouching in my seat in the back row of the lecture hall with my notebook open to take notes.  I am snacking on my raw broccoli and whole grain brain muffins, which my friends think are disgusting.  I have to admit that the muffins really just tasted like cardboard, but they were the closest thing to complex carbohydrates that I would allow myself to eat.  I am trying to pay attention to the professor while my friends are making snide comments about the lecture (thus one of the reasons why we are sitting in the back).  What I am really thinking about during lecture is food and all the things I want to eat, but should not eat, cannot eat, must not eat.  Twenty minutes into lecture, I am fast asleep (the another reason why we are sitting in the back). 

I was a pretty bad student.  In all four years of college, the best sleep I got was in lecture.  The warm lecture halls and the monotone voice of the professor created the perfect nap envirnoment.  I was always behind on sleep, thanks to crew, and always falling asleep in lecture with my rabbit food in hand.