Gaining

Honestly, it's harder to find a cheap way of *avoiding* gaining weight at uni.

As a student, you'll either be eating:
a) hall food
food you make yourself
c) take-away
or d) any combination of the above.

a) Hall food tends to be like school food was, except there's no Jamie Oliver sticking his nose in. So chips, rice, pasta and lots of grease. Cheap cuts of meat (see below) and the best part is it's FREE - or rather you've already paid for it so you might as well eat it.

as a student, you're poor and try to save money, so you buy 'value' versions of things - and in most cases this means fattening. Cheap cheese can be up to 35% fat! Cheap cuts of meat (especially pork and bacon) are often heavy in fat too. And things like value ham slices are all fat and salt.

c) Having saved 60p buying Tesco's plastic bread instead of Kingsmill, you feel less bad about having a kebab on the way home from the Union. Nobody knows what goes into those things (although the big rotating lump on the skewer is popularly believed to be an elephant's leg) but it sure ain't diet! Wash down with four pints of cheap lager or cider for that belly-busting feeling, assuming you can keep it down ...

It depends a bit on the university, I suspect. At mine we still had to pay per item in the cafeterias, but the fatty foods was still much cheaper than the healthier ones. That might not be normal in the UK, though.

I found that the most fattening aspect of university was the anonymity. Again, this wouldn't necessarily apply everywhere, but at the the huge public university I went to you could go to the cafeteria 6 times a day and gain 100 pounds and no one would have even noticed, let alone commented.