Yale Refuses to Believe that Skinny Student Is Just Thin, Tries to Make Her Pork Up

Shouldn’t
one of the top colleges in the country know that the Body Mass
Index (BMI) is just a guide, not a whole diagnosis? Apparently not
at Yale, though perhaps they’re now learning. Frances Chan, 20, has
been fighting with the college over how much she weighs, as though
it’s their business. The 5-foot-2-inch history major weighs 92
pounds.

That’s not enough for Yale. They wanted her to put on weight,
convinced she had an eating disorder. She insisted that she didn’t
and that she was just thin, which should have ended the whole
thing, but did not. The college’s health center harassed her,
ordered her in for weekly weigh-ins, and they threatened to put her
on medical leave, telling her she’d die if she didn’t gain more
weight. What they wouldn’t do is apparently actually listen to her,
so she took to the Huffington Post to
write an essay about the torment:

She had finally cracked me. I was Sisyphus the Greek king,
forever trapped trying uselessly to push a boulder up a hill. Being
forced to meet a standard that I could never meet was stressful and
made me resent meals. I broke down sobbing in my dean’s office, in
my suitemate’s arms afterwards, and Saturday morning on the phone
with my parents. At this rate, I was well on my way to developing
an eating disorder before anyone could diagnose the currently
nonexistent one.

It seems Yale has a history of forcing its students through this
process. A
Yale Herald piece from 2010 told the story of students in
similar situations. It’s disturbing how little things have changed.
“Stacy” was “informed that if she kept failing to reach [Yale
Health]’s goals for her, she would be withdrawn for the following
semester.” Unfortunately, “the more she stressed out about gaining
weight, the more she lost her appetite.”

Furthermore, a recent graduate messaged me saying that her
cholesterol had actually gone up due to the intensive weight-gain
diet she used to release herself from weekly weigh-ins.

The New Haven Register
picked up on the story this week and reports that after all
this nightmarish treatment, Chan finally got a doctor to
acknowledge that BMI is just one indicator of proper health and the
school finally seems to grasp that she does not have an eating
disorder. They’re still going to force her come visit the health
center for monitoring, but only once per semester. She should
consider herself lucky!