I got weighed in band once for “we’re ordering new marching band uniforms” even though I wasn’t in the marching band, just the sit-down symphonic one.

It was required to pass the class to graduate, required to pass the fitness tests to pass the course, and all but a handful of (mainly athlete) students didn’t know if we were going to graduate on time until near the end of the class.

And it didn’t make us into lifetime exercisers. I don’t know why the teacher thought driving us to physical breakdown multiple times a week would.

I’m seriously considering adopting this as my motto

Alrighty then, git in The Box with the others. We’ll let you out once you’ve learned your lesson.

We all need to remember that blanket “healthy eating” and “healthy exercise” advice isn’t totally benign stuff. It comes with the potential for complications, and, like any drug, side-effects as well.

This is one of my biggest problems with public health promotion efforts and campaigns — this kind of advice *can’t* be applied equally, and safely, to everyone. And people for whom this advice may be dangerous/counterproductive shouldn’t be viewed as some kind of anomalous exception. I would venture a guess that many, many more people than we might assume live with conditions (or even past experiences, like disordered eating) that would render this type of advice useless or risky.

And you know what else? This is why I think there needs to be closer ties between the disability and fat acceptance communities. Because, at least from the social model perspective, fatness is disabled in many ways, and programs intended to address “obesity” often indirectly target disabled people.

The quote from the department chair in the article, “a sound mind in a sound body”, is a direct quote – a motto from the eugenics movement of a hundred years ago. It’s terrifying that educators are clinging to that, and using it to inform policy. He says, right out loud (*blink blink*), that he sees it as his professional duty – him, who students have not consulted for advice – to “tell students they’re not healthy”. No, that’s none of his business. None of his business in any way, shape, or form. No student has any responsibility to disclose their health status to him, and no student deserves to be assessed and judged by him.

Diet classes are very obviously not appropriate for everyone. (Problems with generic advice have already been identified in this thread; also, how many people with eating disorders are they plonking into these classes, to be compulsorily triggered multiple times per week?)

In addition, however, exercise classes are not appropriate for everyone either. Recommending “activity” is not appropriate for everyone. I presume people with some disabilities are made to jump through hoops (which cost both money and energy) to get around these compulsory classes. I also fear greatly for those people with certain disabilities for whom off-the-shelf exercise is difficult, impossible, or dangerous who may be caught up in this programme because they don’t have diagnoses (yet/at all/etc), or because their doctors are misinformed about the role of exercise in their condition.

But I agree that if they want to potentially make people sick, or else just be really put off of exercising and eating well, this is exactly the way to do it.

Just for that, I’ll rebel by writing it.

It’s sort of the same reason behavioural changes coming from dieting don’t last — because, while you might be eating really well and getting a healthy amount of exercise during the diet, you’re relying on the “reward” of weight loss to keep you going. Once the reward stops, because you plateau or start regaining weight back, then the healthy behaviours stop, too. Because you were not tapping into the intrinsic rewards of those behaviours to motivate you.

There’s also an issue that, if you frame something (a desirable behaviour, like eating fruits and veggies, taking the stairs, etc.) as a thing that needs to be explicitly *promoted* or that people need to be explicitly *rewarded* for doing, people actually interpret that to mean that the behaviour itself isn’t intrinsically worthwhile. Children who are paid a small amount of money to solve puzzles (that they would normally have fun solving on their own) actually begin to rate the worth of the puzzles lower, because they make the assumption that, if you have to be paid (or rewarded, or exhorted) to do something, then it probably means that thing is kind of icky, in and of itself.

Another example is when parents hold out dessert to children as a *reward* for eating vegetables. Naturally, the vegetables then lose whatever natural lustre they might’ve had, because they become merely a means to an end.

Sorry for rambling, I’ve just been reading/thinking a lot about this topic. I obviously need to write an entire post on it.

I actually think telling people what to do is counterproductive, but that’s more of a philosophical quibble than a nutritional one.