"...some excess junk in the trunk."

"Most Chicago students contacted by the Maroon agreed that the average first-year does indeed put on the pounds. 'Most guys get a large gut and punchy in the face, while most girls get some excess junk in the trunk,' said Pat Rich, an undeclared first-year in the College." The paper quotes another student as saying "The 'freshmen 15' is true, even among upperclassmen." This does not make much sense linguistically, but I think the idea is, Chicago students just keep gaining weight.

This simply cannot be. It is physically impossible to gain weight your freshman year at Chicago, for these reasons:

1) The dining hall food is probably worse than whatever you were eating before college. If not, I'm sorry.

2) Frat parties--where beer is traditionally consumed to the point of weight gain--are big during Orientation Week but people generally stop going shortly after, and much O-Week drinking isn't, let us say, properly digested, because many U of C students' first experience drinking seems to be during O-Week.

3) Candy from many campus coffee shops (I'm looking at you, Uncle Joe's) is stale to the point of being inedible. If even empty calories are hard to choke down, what are you left with?

4) It's too cold to play outdoor sports, go for a jog, etc., for much of the year, but it's also too cold, not to mention to dangerous, to go out at 4 am to satisfy your junk food cravings.

As for the mysterious origin of the excess junk in Chicago women's trunks, I'm thinking it might just be in that first-year student's imagination, sort of like how I imagine that the guy studying nearby at the Reg is actually a dead ringer for Jeremy Irons, while nothing of the kind has ever happened.