"She's gonna get fat."

As college students, we are constantly inundated with new knowledge. It can be useful, thought-provoking, or crammed into our head on a Starbucks-fueled binge several hours before an exam. However, very rarely do we question the validity of all this new knowledge (unless you take philosophy classes, then you’ll question away).

That’s where College Candy comes in. We’re not going to debate whether or not the Theory of Relativity actually exists (a disappointment, I know, but I’m a communications major and stopped taking science classes after Baby Bio fresh year). However, we are here to thoroughly investigate the most widespread college knowledge (no, not rhyming): the myth.

Alright guys, I’m gonna level with you: I’m a big fan of the brewskies. I like Sam Adams Pumpkin Ale, Sweetwater 420, the occasional stein of Newcastle, and the slightly more frequent funnel full of Bud Light. I particularly like that I can drink copious amounts of beer without the consequences that would come from drinking the same amount of vodka, water & lime. Most of all, I like that beer lends itself easily to day-drinking.

What I don’t like about beer (besides how much it makes me want to sing drinking songs) is that it makes me fat.

It’s not even the eventual, slowly-creeping-towards-your-thighs fat. It’s like an immediate, “I’m so carbonated and delicious and I’m going to make you so full you can’t suck in anymore” variety of fat. So it’s no wonder that beer contributes majorly to the Freshman 15, right? Ehh, yes and no. Read More »

Here are a few reasons why you should be eating breakfast:1. Lucky Charms might be the best things on earth.

2. People who eat breakfast tend to lose more weight than those who don’t.

3. Um, pancakes? Hellooooo, heaven!

4. If you don’t, you will lose your virginity at a younger age.

A recent study was done in Japan and found that those surveyed who ate breakfast in their middle school years lost their virginity almost 2 years later (on average) than those who didn’t. At first glance one would think that Tony the Tiger may have been the best sex ed teacher around, but really the reasoning is more closely related to the kinds of homes kids grow up in; supportive families serve breakfast and not-so-supportive families don’t…and don’t teach anything about sex, either.

I tend to eat 2 breakfasts every morning, so maybe that’s why I didn’t do the dirty until I was 21? And maybe my obsession with breakfast-for-dinner can explain the sexual drought I’ve been in for months.

It’s all starting to make sense now.

“Is it supposed to be this hard?” I whined to my mom in an email on Tuesday night. I remember in years gone by that seniors generally didn’t seem like they were having problems until the second semester, when the crunch really hits. But sure enough, Tuesday afternoon saw me sitting on the floor, looking despondently at the mess in my room while scarfing down Lucky Charms like my life depended on it.

Taking 20 credits, working two jobs, and writing your thesis doesn’t leave for a whole lot of free time, and that’s a pretty hard thing to adjust to. I usually like to procrastinate – I work better with a gun to my head, it seems. But now I have to work in advance, because I don’t have time to do things the way I normally do.

This weekend, I don’t even have time to drink. What is my world coming to?

As for lessons learned these past two weeks or so, I realized the value of backing your sh*t up like your life depends on it. My thesis chapter was due on Monday. I didn’t finish it until Tuesday. Now, because I have an older version of OpenOffice (a free version of Microsoft Office, essentially), when my computer decided to spazz out, I lost 11 out of 12 pages.

Cue comfort food binging. Read More »

[Every week, CC and John will bring you some of the wierdest, funniest, saddest things he hears on his college campus.  Join the Overheard revolution!  Leave your own overheard convos in the comments.]

Strange, silly and awkward things overheard on campus this week:

- A lanky blonde man leans against a doorway, talking to a short-haired brunette.

“She’s really… nice, you know?” He shakes his head. “I mean, I just wanted someone to care about.”

“But a freshman?” she asks, feigning surprise. “Really!“

“Yeah. It was like fishing with dynamite.”

- Two grizzled, swarthy males stand in the dining hall.

“Man, I can’t believe there aren’t any forks,” remarks one, his thick lower lip turned in a pout. He moves one finger toward his collar unconsciously.

His friend looks sadly at the empty racks. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t even know anyone who uses spoons.”

- Across the dining hall, a guy stands up and starts singing “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” from Mulan . About three quarters of the table joins in within seconds. One other guy grabs his tray, gets up and stalks away. “I thought we were done with this,” he says, darkly.

- Down the hallway, a pink-faced man is tying a lumpy plastic bag to a door. As I pass by, he looks up and smiles conspiratorially.

“It’s ladybugs,” he says. Read More »

I stopped eating cereal a while ago and just recently had a craving for it. I scanned the boxes in that gluttonous aisle for the perfect thing. Luckily, I was having an ‘I want to be healthy!’ day and I bought one of Kashi’s many delightful cereals- — which has treated my taste buds wonderfully. But my purchase has not stopped me from day dreaming about the sugary goodness I used to ingest daily as a kid.

You have to admit, it’s a lot easier to get out of bed every day when you know a bowl of marshmallows and milk awaits you. Of course kids and adults alike are hooked on this crap — it’s got freakin’ crack in it. And I don’t care that everyone and their mother is outlawing it and forcing kids to be healthier…there is STILL something to be said for eating a bucket of sugar for breakfast, so here’s my shout out to the top 5 most unhealthfully delicious cereals:

LUCKY CHARMS

They’re magically…charming. They say their serving size is 3/4 a cup..and yet most people, myself included, eat at least twice that amount. So…24 grams of sugar in one sitting? Ah. Who cares. They’ve got rainbows and marshmallows and sugar dripping from the cardboard box.

FRUITY PEBBLES

They’ve got fruit in them…right? Right? Okay. Maybe they don’t. But they’re still awesome. PLUS, they’re accompanied by awesome front-of-box graphics. Read More »

One of my favorite things to do during the weekend at college was stumble down to the dining hall after a night of partying and fill a cereal bowl with about 8 different kinds of cereal.

Through blurry vision and a pounding head, I would reach for one “good-for-you” brand (for the base), and then proceed to find every sweet option available, filling my bowl to the brim with enough chemically altered sugar to keep me hopping for hours.

You see, when I was younger, my mom never let us have sweet cereal. We’d go with her to the grocery store, beg and plead for something with a cartoon character on it, and she’d simply shake her head, reach for the raisin bran, and state, “filling your mouth with sugar first thing in the morning means the dentist is going to have to pull your teeth.”

She could scare us for a little while, but once I grew up and realized eating sugary cereal doesn’t really dictate how many cavities you get drilled (I was the healthiest kid alive and still had about 3 of them), I vowed to find my way back the bobble-headed cartoons of my youth and their bounty of sweet.

So now, for your consideration, I present the Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time (or at least my childhood):

Reeses’s Puffs: Even though it tasted nothing like the candy, this cereal was still the shit. Chocolate and peanut butter? With milk?! ALL IN ONE BOWL??! Who cared that the balls were hard and scratched up the top part of your mouth? Who cared that they got stale in a day? You were basically eating candy!!! For breakfast!!! Read More »