Leah: The assignment I received in health class to track my food and calories didn’t bother me at first. But in class, when I looked up my body mass index (BMI) and found that I was supposedly 15 pounds overweight, guilt and shame consumed me as I thought about what I had eaten that day. Soon, I started adding my breakfast into Carb Manager, the app that we had been instructed to download. By lunchtime, I was planning my food around how many calories my meals had rather than tracking what I ate regularly. I developed a fear of gaining weight, fueled by the knowledge of how many calories I was consuming and how much the app told me I “should” be eating.
A month later, I was taken to a clinic and diagnosed with anorexia.
Claire: As I prepare to take health next year to fulfill my graduation requirement, I know that by tracking my weight and calories, I will be going against the warnings of every single healthcare professional I spoke to while struggling with my eating disorder. My doctors, dieticians and therapists all emphasized the danger of obsessing over numbers like weight, BMI and caloric intake. When I was in treatment, I filled out a form each morning with a list of eating disorder behaviors, putting a check next to any I exhibited since the last meeting. Counting calories was on this list. That is why it was so jarring for me to hear that schools are teaching this dangerous habit. Because Health is a required class, students at risk of eating disorders are forced to engage in these triggering behaviors to graduate.
Eating disorders are prevalent everywhere, including at Grant. In fact, according to a study conducted by The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, approximately 11 percent of high school students have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. For every choice made by curriculum writers and health teachers, there are real repercussions for students.
The curriculum of the stand-alone health class at Grant covers many topics, including subjects related to mental health as well as lessons covering physical health, like sleep, stress and diet. Unfortunately, with so many issues to cover, and class only every other day, many students feel that there is not sufficient time dedicated to every category of health. The diet portion is only given three to four class periods, making lessons seem rushed and surface-level. “My first response is just the amount of time that we spent on it was so not enough … for teenagers that’s such a big part of our life and something that you kind of start to get to make choices about on your own for better or for worse,” says senior Rebecca Patterson.
Included in the diet unit is an assignment to download an app to track your food, calories and weight for three days. According to Patterson, there was a brief class discussion on the prevalence of eating disorders in teens, but afterward, there was no further conversation. “We also didn’t have any sort of disclaimer or lesson about the fact that all of our diets might look different and that’s okay,” she says.
Schools have a responsibility to make sure their curriculum is taught with sensitivity and inclusivity to fulfill their purpose of preparing students to make healthy decisions.
With 95 percent of people with eating disorders being between the ages of 12 and 25, nutrition is an especially complicated topic to cover in high school, but one worth taking the time to get right.
“People have many different types of challenges. Almost every topic we cover can be triggering to a certain population of students. We can’t shy away from teaching topics because of this. Rather, we need to recognize and be aware and empathetic to those around us,” says Grant health teacher Randy Heath.
However, there is a difference between talking about triggering topics like eating disorders and forcing students to engage in those behaviors. Teachers have the power to determine how they teach these important topics, and it’s time to choose student safety and drop the weight, BMI and calorie-tracking assignments.
Replacing them should be in-depth conversations about what ‘health’ really is, compared to the common misconceptions. Most importantly, nutrition curriculum must emphasize and respect the breadth of what healthy eating looks like for different individuals. After all, health is much broader than a range of numbers. These classes should require inclusive and specific depictions of health based on personal diet needs, lifestyle choices and physical activity.
Giving students as much information as possible on various ways of healthy eating will provide them with the tools to form their healthy habits.
The risk that teaching a one-size-fits-all nutrition curriculum poses isn’t just making students uncomfortable. The current numbers-tracking approach in Grant health classes is putting students’ health in danger.
