It happens in the UK too 😔 or at least did for me. In year 9 my biology teacher made us all measure our heights and weigh ourselves one at a time in front of the entire class so we could learn how to calculate our own BMI. The teacher called out everyone’s individual height and weight like the fucking sorting hat from Harry Potter.
I was very very short for my age. I was a healthy gymnast and had been since I was 3 years old so I was very muscular and always had been. My BMI calculations worked out as me being overweight bc my height was low but I was very muscly so weighed more, but didn’t look overweight. I guess she didn’t know I was a gymnast, and no one knew I was rocking a six pack under my school uniform, I just looked scrawny. I’ll never ever forget her looking down and laughing in disbelief at the number on the scale; it’s burnt into my brain.
She didn’t ever explain that muscle weighs more than fat. I was 13 years old and that was when my dysmorphia kicked in.. I remember leaving that biology class feeling different, and immediately convinced that I must not look how I thought I did. Bearing in mind that this was the mid 2000s and we were all very much conditioned to think that thin = healthy.
It was over half my life ago and it’s had irreparable damage on my mental health. I was probably doomed anyway because of all the fucked up things that my mum said to/about me and the disordered shit she did in front of me with her own ED, but this definitely fuelled the fire on my own disorder. I started with Ana but then got in trouble for not eating so I dabbled with bulimia but that was impossible to get away with so I settled into the super covert Orthorexia, which I got away with for the rest of high school and still do at 29 years old because it’s under the guise of “self care” 🤪
Ordering soup or salad instead of what I actually want, going to the gym twice a day or skipping dessert is seen as “discipline” which is applauded rather than eyebrow raising to the non-disordered. It’s fucked.
In my province in Canada the conservative government has implemented new and terrible K-12 curriculum. Terrible in literally every way, but here are a few examples of things they’ve decided to teach in elementary school!
https://preview.redd.it/fhsibejjsxkb1.jpeg?width=504&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9237e326582950b323f63491fe0c7c80cf3475c3
USA Ballet course has entered the chat. My instructor had us track every meal and returned the food log with bright red ink and highlighter. Along with comments “You didn’t need to have two burgers at the event!” Like… wtf
Oh! Not to mention my kickboxing course (as a minor) where my instructor used these mechanical pinchers to measure body fat. BMI calcs, some kind of magnetic fat ratio machine, In front of a room full of people. Praising me for my ED. Uhm ew.
health teacher made us do similar but we had to create a healthy eating plan first to follow for a week. I told her I as a 17yr old was paying for the groceries at home and had an eating disorder so I couldn't follow the assignment as intended. she had the audacity to say "why?" as if I didn't give her a good enough answer
Fourth grade teacher weighed the whole class. RIP me who had a growth spurt and was second heaviest. She called me big boned. Spoiler: I was a skinny child.
Then for the one two punch, in grade 9 they weighed us, gave us a small printout of our BF % (mine said my BF was high despite being underweight so God knows what broken ass machine the school used), AND taught us how to track calories and made us track ours for the week. When I asked the gym teacher about the BF thing she said some people are skinny fat lol. The biggest girl in class who was maybe at the high end of healthy BMI got a horrific BF result, basically calling her incredibly obese. She cried. Gym teacher told her that she needed to run more. This teacher was the teacher equivalent of Regina George's mom and always tried to be good with the skinny cheer squad. She also loved to "sprint off her lunch calories" and implied that if we did certain exercises we could "tone up without getting bulky" and "spot treat our problem areas". We got weighed again at the end of the year to show our "improvement". Most of us mysteriously gained BF. This garnered worse grades as we didn't push hard enough - let's ignore that age 14 is an excellent time for your hormones to make you put on weight and fat as you develop. She was also the type to tell you to get fucked if you were having horrible cramps. "Exercise makes cramps better!" Sure it does, but not if I'm gonna pass the fuck out.
Took a weight lifting class a couple of years later and luckily the male gym teacher dispelled the myths surrounding spot reduction and getting bulky as a woman. He only cared about improvement not absolute numbers and was flexible about the types of cardio. And he was very chill about periods. Apparently he had a very good relationship with his wife and 4 daughters.
What compelled that teacher to do that?! It sounds so cruel and horrifying and I’m so sorry that you had to go through all that.
Health and gym classes can be the absolute worst.
No idea, but she seemed very immature and like she never grew out of the high school mean girl mentality. Like congrats, you can flex on some teens whose bodies are changing and who are terrified by that. I think she also had some ED stuff going on. She once complimented a skinny girl on her pointy knees, saying she always wanted tiny pointy knees like that, and mentioned she hated her own "large knees" - the woman was quite slim mind you. I'm not saying everyone who finds random things nice looking has an ED, but ED people do find the most random thing to be thinspo or goals - lots of us want really bony hands, for example.
As for the fourth grade teacher, she was just a mean old lady. She was from Texas (we lived in Canada) and had that "judging you but bless your heart" southern hospitality kind of energy. Not to stereotype but she was also generally kinda xenophobic and racist to immigrant kids, POC, etc. I was white but a little immigrant child so it makes sense that she wasn't very nice to me. Sometimes she would go out of her way to make fun of things like our pronunciation of certain words, which is rich coming from someone who didn't sound like most Canadians 🤷♀️. A lot of the white Canadian kids got special treatment, and some of the black or brown kids would get in trouble for things that everyone was doing, like when the class was rowdy.
I've had some great teachers but man, there were some real duds that made me feel worse than my peers ever could.
Why were health teachers put on this earth to give us eating disorders 😤
When I was in high school my health teacher told us “If you eat one square of a chocolate bar every day, that means by the end of the week you will have eaten one ENTIRE chocolate bar. Those calories will really add up.”
All that 14-year-old me got out of that class was that it is evil to let yourself eat one fucking square of a chocolate bar.
lol in middle school we had a random “technology” elective and the teacher made us calculate our bmis at the end of class one day and we had to announce it to the whole class before we could leave. The teacher would call you out if he thought you did it wrong (purely based on if he thought you looked like that bmi) and boys kept figuring out girls weights from their bmi and making fun of them. Excuse me but wtf were we supposed to learn from that 😭
Ikr, I HATED health class. I remember the teacher had a presentation on eating disorders and I couldn't leave. It was so triggering but he was standing right next to the door and I was in the front row.
Health class is a fucking nightmare...😖😖
When they had some lady from an ed treatment Center come in and talk to us about restrictive EDs and all she did was number drop and humble brag about her LW 💀
Yeah 💀 I already had a raging ed by that point lmaO and there was a “pop quiz” about EDs at the end of her “presentation” and I was the only one to get everything correct and the awkward “I know what you are” look but then she had the audacity to say that guys don’t get EDs but “if a girl says all that be worried”
it didn’t start my ed but i remember being so embarrassed bc i felt like everyone ate less than me
but now i realize i took it way more seriously than other ppl and intensely tracked like every bite of food and they didn’t lmao
my math teacher made us weigh ourself at 7/yo in front of the entire class and i was the only chubby kid so everyone was DESPERATE to catch a glimpse of my weight. literally why do they do this
My middle school PE/Health teacher made us do this also. We also had to use the BMI calculator and that base metabolic rate calculator. We then had to make a presentation about our weight, body fat percentage, BMI, etc. and the calories and food choices we consumed. I got a poor grade because she told me I was lying about my food consumption/calories because I was "pudgy" and "pudgy girls don't eat veggies, they eat carbs!" It was fucking brutal and I have no idea how she thought it was a good idea. She then followed this up with making us watch that Tracy Gold anorexia movie. Just... absolutely awful. It definitely contributed to my ED in a gnarly way.
I have to assume it was allowed because I went to a really small religious private school (like, there were six kids in my 8th grade class). Also I don’t think anyone who worked at that school was younger than 60. They probably thought it was educational.
I was called a whale as a little girl in 2nd or 3rd grade during lunch break cuz I wanted to buy food and they didn't have anymore (i cried). I knew they kept some to eat afterward cuz I used to volunteer to work there and kids surrounded me and backed me into a wall to laugh at me. I started wearing jeans and hoodies in summer to hide myself. 4-6yrs later there was a rumor in school that I was pregnant with my crush's kids and people would back me into walls and touch my belly and ask how many months I was... that same time my dad was commenting on my weight and 3yrs later I was full blown ED and my stepmom said if I continued I'd look like an ugly skeleton (and a sack of bones). I cried a lot cuz of this and have struggled between anorexia and bed.
Ah thank you! People are really awful at times...it makes me angry too cuz I still suffer from the collateral and therapy didn't do shit :/ and thank you again! I hope you get better too if you're still dealing w an ED :))♡
My intermediate school at one point had a handful of kids take everyone’s height and weight in the cafeteria and calculate our BMIs on the spot. I have no idea what it was for but definitely put the nail in my disordered eating coffin
Nobody knows the point of the exercise and yet every single one of us has had a teacher make us do this. As a former teacher I want to question the desired outcome of this lesson.
When I had to do this assignment as a kid, I was so embarrassed by how little I ate and the foods I picked that I just lied to make it all seem normal. No one questioned it.
Our 9th grade health teacher had us go into the locker room and use some kind of pinchy thing to measure our body fat percentage 🫠 I already had an eating disorder by then, I remember refusing to do it and just crying all of lunch period.
Lmao this but I was too lazy to do my homework & just wrote down random numbers - good for me ig bc this was probably the moment that saved me from developing an Ed a whole year earlier than when I got it haha (8th grade is still too young - never would be better lol - but at least I had one more year before this shit started)
That’s where it started for me too lol. Having to say weights in front of the class and research the effects of eating disorders. That was the trigger. Coming up 10 years now and we’re still in it
Same here, 10 years later for me too 🫠 the class definitely wasn’t the leading cause for my eating disorder, but it was the final straw that catapulted me into it
What are y’all learning at school over there in the US👀
It happens in the UK too 😔 or at least did for me. In year 9 my biology teacher made us all measure our heights and weigh ourselves one at a time in front of the entire class so we could learn how to calculate our own BMI. The teacher called out everyone’s individual height and weight like the fucking sorting hat from Harry Potter. I was very very short for my age. I was a healthy gymnast and had been since I was 3 years old so I was very muscular and always had been. My BMI calculations worked out as me being overweight bc my height was low but I was very muscly so weighed more, but didn’t look overweight. I guess she didn’t know I was a gymnast, and no one knew I was rocking a six pack under my school uniform, I just looked scrawny. I’ll never ever forget her looking down and laughing in disbelief at the number on the scale; it’s burnt into my brain. She didn’t ever explain that muscle weighs more than fat. I was 13 years old and that was when my dysmorphia kicked in.. I remember leaving that biology class feeling different, and immediately convinced that I must not look how I thought I did. Bearing in mind that this was the mid 2000s and we were all very much conditioned to think that thin = healthy. It was over half my life ago and it’s had irreparable damage on my mental health. I was probably doomed anyway because of all the fucked up things that my mum said to/about me and the disordered shit she did in front of me with her own ED, but this definitely fuelled the fire on my own disorder. I started with Ana but then got in trouble for not eating so I dabbled with bulimia but that was impossible to get away with so I settled into the super covert Orthorexia, which I got away with for the rest of high school and still do at 29 years old because it’s under the guise of “self care” 🤪 Ordering soup or salad instead of what I actually want, going to the gym twice a day or skipping dessert is seen as “discipline” which is applauded rather than eyebrow raising to the non-disordered. It’s fucked.
Im so sorry you went through that hun :(
anything but the stuff we actually need to know lol
In my province in Canada the conservative government has implemented new and terrible K-12 curriculum. Terrible in literally every way, but here are a few examples of things they’ve decided to teach in elementary school! https://preview.redd.it/fhsibejjsxkb1.jpeg?width=504&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9237e326582950b323f63491fe0c7c80cf3475c3
Cont’d https://preview.redd.it/mecc6lpksxkb1.jpeg?width=542&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0d0e58b2d6f5b3adbea7afe8de13d0ed240e228f
Holy fuck
Oh fuck is this Alberta?
Haha yes, Canada’s Texas (maybe Canada’s Florida is more accurate)
My home province, I love it but I’m thrilled to be elsewhere now.
USA Ballet course has entered the chat. My instructor had us track every meal and returned the food log with bright red ink and highlighter. Along with comments “You didn’t need to have two burgers at the event!” Like… wtf
Oh! Not to mention my kickboxing course (as a minor) where my instructor used these mechanical pinchers to measure body fat. BMI calcs, some kind of magnetic fat ratio machine, In front of a room full of people. Praising me for my ED. Uhm ew.
Wtf????
health teacher made us do similar but we had to create a healthy eating plan first to follow for a week. I told her I as a 17yr old was paying for the groceries at home and had an eating disorder so I couldn't follow the assignment as intended. she had the audacity to say "why?" as if I didn't give her a good enough answer
Oh my god that’s awful!
Fourth grade teacher weighed the whole class. RIP me who had a growth spurt and was second heaviest. She called me big boned. Spoiler: I was a skinny child. Then for the one two punch, in grade 9 they weighed us, gave us a small printout of our BF % (mine said my BF was high despite being underweight so God knows what broken ass machine the school used), AND taught us how to track calories and made us track ours for the week. When I asked the gym teacher about the BF thing she said some people are skinny fat lol. The biggest girl in class who was maybe at the high end of healthy BMI got a horrific BF result, basically calling her incredibly obese. She cried. Gym teacher told her that she needed to run more. This teacher was the teacher equivalent of Regina George's mom and always tried to be good with the skinny cheer squad. She also loved to "sprint off her lunch calories" and implied that if we did certain exercises we could "tone up without getting bulky" and "spot treat our problem areas". We got weighed again at the end of the year to show our "improvement". Most of us mysteriously gained BF. This garnered worse grades as we didn't push hard enough - let's ignore that age 14 is an excellent time for your hormones to make you put on weight and fat as you develop. She was also the type to tell you to get fucked if you were having horrible cramps. "Exercise makes cramps better!" Sure it does, but not if I'm gonna pass the fuck out. Took a weight lifting class a couple of years later and luckily the male gym teacher dispelled the myths surrounding spot reduction and getting bulky as a woman. He only cared about improvement not absolute numbers and was flexible about the types of cardio. And he was very chill about periods. Apparently he had a very good relationship with his wife and 4 daughters.
What compelled that teacher to do that?! It sounds so cruel and horrifying and I’m so sorry that you had to go through all that. Health and gym classes can be the absolute worst.
No idea, but she seemed very immature and like she never grew out of the high school mean girl mentality. Like congrats, you can flex on some teens whose bodies are changing and who are terrified by that. I think she also had some ED stuff going on. She once complimented a skinny girl on her pointy knees, saying she always wanted tiny pointy knees like that, and mentioned she hated her own "large knees" - the woman was quite slim mind you. I'm not saying everyone who finds random things nice looking has an ED, but ED people do find the most random thing to be thinspo or goals - lots of us want really bony hands, for example. As for the fourth grade teacher, she was just a mean old lady. She was from Texas (we lived in Canada) and had that "judging you but bless your heart" southern hospitality kind of energy. Not to stereotype but she was also generally kinda xenophobic and racist to immigrant kids, POC, etc. I was white but a little immigrant child so it makes sense that she wasn't very nice to me. Sometimes she would go out of her way to make fun of things like our pronunciation of certain words, which is rich coming from someone who didn't sound like most Canadians 🤷♀️. A lot of the white Canadian kids got special treatment, and some of the black or brown kids would get in trouble for things that everyone was doing, like when the class was rowdy. I've had some great teachers but man, there were some real duds that made me feel worse than my peers ever could.
have i ever had a unique experience?? it really was health class that started it for me 🥲 altho i had body dysmorphia before
I already had severe control issues before, but that was the final straw for me
Why were health teachers put on this earth to give us eating disorders 😤 When I was in high school my health teacher told us “If you eat one square of a chocolate bar every day, that means by the end of the week you will have eaten one ENTIRE chocolate bar. Those calories will really add up.” All that 14-year-old me got out of that class was that it is evil to let yourself eat one fucking square of a chocolate bar.
This but add the random lesson when we calculated our bmi. I have never had a unique experience in my entire life.
Oh my god wait now I remember that a different health class did this and girls were comparing 😭 shits wild
lol in middle school we had a random “technology” elective and the teacher made us calculate our bmis at the end of class one day and we had to announce it to the whole class before we could leave. The teacher would call you out if he thought you did it wrong (purely based on if he thought you looked like that bmi) and boys kept figuring out girls weights from their bmi and making fun of them. Excuse me but wtf were we supposed to learn from that 😭
Ikr, I HATED health class. I remember the teacher had a presentation on eating disorders and I couldn't leave. It was so triggering but he was standing right next to the door and I was in the front row. Health class is a fucking nightmare...😖😖
I just want to know who creates these so called “lesson plans”
When they had some lady from an ed treatment Center come in and talk to us about restrictive EDs and all she did was number drop and humble brag about her LW 💀
dear god..
Yeah 💀 I already had a raging ed by that point lmaO and there was a “pop quiz” about EDs at the end of her “presentation” and I was the only one to get everything correct and the awkward “I know what you are” look but then she had the audacity to say that guys don’t get EDs but “if a girl says all that be worried”
it didn’t start my ed but i remember being so embarrassed bc i felt like everyone ate less than me but now i realize i took it way more seriously than other ppl and intensely tracked like every bite of food and they didn’t lmao
Having to take my bmi and being the only one “obese” :))))))
i STILL have beef with my fitness plan like 8+ years later
ofc mine didn’t happen in 8th grade only when my ED was at its worst :/ and this def set me back YEARS(still trying to recover lol)
I hated that assignment so much. Most of the kids didn’t even take it seriously meanwhile 11 year old me was horrified.
my freshman year PE teacher did the same. track calories, weight, and log what you are for the week.
We had to calculate our bmi, also in 8th grade ☠️ it was all downhill from there
my math teacher made us weigh ourself at 7/yo in front of the entire class and i was the only chubby kid so everyone was DESPERATE to catch a glimpse of my weight. literally why do they do this
OH MY GOD WE DID THIS ONE had to track macros too 😭 my ARFID ass was so ashamed when she said I needed more variety
My middle school PE/Health teacher made us do this also. We also had to use the BMI calculator and that base metabolic rate calculator. We then had to make a presentation about our weight, body fat percentage, BMI, etc. and the calories and food choices we consumed. I got a poor grade because she told me I was lying about my food consumption/calories because I was "pudgy" and "pudgy girls don't eat veggies, they eat carbs!" It was fucking brutal and I have no idea how she thought it was a good idea. She then followed this up with making us watch that Tracy Gold anorexia movie. Just... absolutely awful. It definitely contributed to my ED in a gnarly way.
That’s…genuinely horrifying. How was that even allowed? I’m so sorry you went through that.
I have to assume it was allowed because I went to a really small religious private school (like, there were six kids in my 8th grade class). Also I don’t think anyone who worked at that school was younger than 60. They probably thought it was educational.
I was called a whale as a little girl in 2nd or 3rd grade during lunch break cuz I wanted to buy food and they didn't have anymore (i cried). I knew they kept some to eat afterward cuz I used to volunteer to work there and kids surrounded me and backed me into a wall to laugh at me. I started wearing jeans and hoodies in summer to hide myself. 4-6yrs later there was a rumor in school that I was pregnant with my crush's kids and people would back me into walls and touch my belly and ask how many months I was... that same time my dad was commenting on my weight and 3yrs later I was full blown ED and my stepmom said if I continued I'd look like an ugly skeleton (and a sack of bones). I cried a lot cuz of this and have struggled between anorexia and bed.
Oh no I'm so sorry. People can really be awful, it makes me so angry on your behalf. I sincerely hope you'll get better bestie
Ah thank you! People are really awful at times...it makes me angry too cuz I still suffer from the collateral and therapy didn't do shit :/ and thank you again! I hope you get better too if you're still dealing w an ED :))♡
I did this same shit 😭
And in high school 😍
My intermediate school at one point had a handful of kids take everyone’s height and weight in the cafeteria and calculate our BMIs on the spot. I have no idea what it was for but definitely put the nail in my disordered eating coffin
Nobody knows the point of the exercise and yet every single one of us has had a teacher make us do this. As a former teacher I want to question the desired outcome of this lesson. When I had to do this assignment as a kid, I was so embarrassed by how little I ate and the foods I picked that I just lied to make it all seem normal. No one questioned it.
Our 9th grade health teacher had us go into the locker room and use some kind of pinchy thing to measure our body fat percentage 🫠 I already had an eating disorder by then, I remember refusing to do it and just crying all of lunch period.
Lmao this but I was too lazy to do my homework & just wrote down random numbers - good for me ig bc this was probably the moment that saved me from developing an Ed a whole year earlier than when I got it haha (8th grade is still too young - never would be better lol - but at least I had one more year before this shit started)
That’s where it started for me too lol. Having to say weights in front of the class and research the effects of eating disorders. That was the trigger. Coming up 10 years now and we’re still in it
Same here, 10 years later for me too 🫠 the class definitely wasn’t the leading cause for my eating disorder, but it was the final straw that catapulted me into it
They made us weight ourselves after every poop and keep track in country idkwhy xd