Welcome to purgatory, more commonly known as the second floor of the AFC, where girls make an art of torturing their cardiovascular systems without breaking a sweat or replacing a single hair clip. On the first floor men grunt and joke as they lift weights, but up the stairs lies a whole different jungle. Here the symphony of machines humming and running shorts swishing is punctuated only by furtive glances at another girl's mile split. Upon her primordial visit, Fannie First-Year cannot help but feel as if she has accidentally stumbled into an issue of "Self" magazine.
Fast forward an hour. Covered in happy, productive sweat, Fannie makes her way to the dining hall. A little more confident of her place among the athletic displays of beauty (or beautiful displays of athleticism?) that grace the rows of torturous exercise contraptions, she gives Dean a particularly wide grin. Access granted, she crosses the threshold.
As she pockets her ID card, she hesitates, for this is true test. That little voice in her head that whispered to her to do just one more lap of the "fat burn" routine is now shouting at her. Rational logic loses out to emotional mathematics as she tries to calculate exactly how much she is "allowed" to eat. To the outsider, it appears as if she's paused for the shortest of seconds, as if to scratch her nose; inside her head, however, whirs a series of sloppy, uninformed computations.
This split-second of terror haunts many a University female, especially in her earliest days. Collectively, it embodies the latent fear of the Freshman 15 (or 10, or 5
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