Well now I've about heard it all. Some people are "big boned" some small and some are somewhere in between - is it up to a schooling facility to decide in which category a person should fall? I think not.
A 92 pound Yale University student was recently facing expulsion from the school unless she could PROVE she did not have an eating disorder. Okay, so we're talking about a small boned, thin, Taiwanese-born gal. She's always been tiny. At 20 years old, she's only 5'2" as well. That doesn't mean she's unhealthy, it just means she's a small woman.
So what do Yale executives do? They tell the gal - Frances Chan - she MUST gain weight. How? By force feeding herself junk food - plenty of carbs, ice cream, cookies, you name it, to prove she wasn't starving herself.
Just like some struggle with weight loss, so too, do others have trouble putting weight on. Overweight, underweight, just right, the bottom line is, if you are healthy and happy, that's all that should matter.
"I have never had an eating disorder," says Chan, "but all the pressure from Yale to eat more was making me sick. I finally just told them that I wasn't going to force-feed myself anymore." I would say that should be an option.
Apparently Chan's problems began when she visited Yale's cancer centre concerned about a lump in her breast which turned out to be benign. Through the process doctors found her body mass index (BMI) was out of proportion and they felt she needed to gain weight.
"I told them my whole family is skinny and that I was eating healthy and well... but they said... I could be forced to leave college if I did not deal with it."
A barrage of testing ensued along with force feeding and repeated check ups. "I was eating a lot of carbs and three or four scoops of ice cream and cookies before bed. I even stopped walking up the stairs..."
With all of that, Chan gained a whopping two pounds. She is NOT a big girl and nor likely, is she meant to be. Don't we all wish we could gorge on chips and ice cream and stay thin... and maybe Chan would like to carry a few more pounds, who knows? But some metabolisms just work differently and it shouldn't be up to a university to dictate or to change a person's natural body make up. I can see expressing a genuine concern about a potential health problem and offering support, but the way Yale went about this is just wrong. Force feeding junk food? Definitely not the answer and perhaps above all people, a "Yale big wig" should know that.
