Get it together, yale

For an Ivy League university, Yale has made some dumb moves in regard to its students.

In March, Frances Chan, a student at Yale studying history, submitted an essay to the Huffington Post. Chan was at risk of being kicked out of school because of her weight.

According to Yale Health Center standards, Chan is extremely underweight. A clinician told Chan she would be put on medical leave unless she agreed to
attend weekly weigh-ins.

Weekly weigh-ins led to urine tests, blood tests, an EKG on her heart and appointments with a nutritionist and a mental health counselor — all while still attending classes and studying for exams.

The medical professionals of Yale Health accused Chan of having an eating disorder. At 20 years old, she is 5-foot-2 and has weighed 90 pounds since high school. She comes from a family of super skinny people and has never considered her weight unusual or unhealthy

Chan began a weight-gain diet. In her essay, Chan reported eating more carbs at each meal, eating three to four scoops of ice cream twice a day and purposefully loading up on junk food right before bed and avoiding exercise whenever possible, just to gain two pounds.

These eating habits inflicted to meet Yale Health’s standards pose a greater risk to Chan’s health than the imaginary problem Yale Heath has been harassing her about. A recent graduate of Yale, who contacted Chan, developed high cholesterol after starting a weight-gain diet similar to Chan’s to get out of the weekly weigh-ins.

A 2010 feature in the Yale Herald found two other Yale students whose lives were interrupted by Yale Health. In one case, Alice, a fake name given to her by the writer, was a competitive gymnast who was unable to compete because she weighed too little.

Stacy, also a fake name, was threatened with being kicked out of school unless she increased her weight, regardless of her grades. The more she failed to reach Yale Health’s standards, the more anxious she became and the more she lost her appetite.

I don’t think the intentions of Yale Health were wrong. They genuinely thought these students were suffering from eating disorders, and they wanted to help them, just as any school is expected to. They just went about it in the wrong way.

By basing its standards on BMI, Yale Health left no room for consideration of family history or genetics. Holding the students’ education over their heads is unfair and pushes the students to dangerous means to satisfy conditions they can’t control.

It must also be noted that while targeting students who were underweight, none of the reports mentioned efforts to help overweight students. About 34.9 percent of adults in the United States are obese, while fewer than 2 percent of U.S. adults are underweight.  

The college years are the most influential in shaping the lifestyle habits and behaviors we will carry into adulthood. With obesity being a larger issue, it would make sense for Yale Health and all universities to focus more on that end of the spectrum.

More importantly, universities need to redefine what healthy means. There are different kinds of healthy, and the same standards can’t be applied to every individual.  

lnbanks@indiana.edu
@LexiaBanks