As some of you already know, I’m pretty much addicted to Google Reader. This evening I was reading and came across this article, which is about a donor who pledged a million bucks to her alma mater…on the condition that the staff lost a collective 250 pounds. If the president loses 25 pounds, the donor will give them an extra $100,000.
The unorthodox challenge grant comes from a health-conscious woman in Oregon who wishes to remain anonymous, Ms. Lynch said. Fit and fond of organic food, the wealthy benefactor believes that obesity is a serious problem in America and wants to give overweight people an incentive to lose pounds.
“The donor is an extraordinary example of a woman who’s led a healthy lifestyle,” Ms. Lynch said. “She’s 87 years old and weighs exactly what she did when she married her husband—117 pounds. It’s a point of pride for her that she has maintained her youthful physique.”
This is appalling. Let’s talk about why.
Here’s the thing. This is clearly not a health-related incentive. If it were really health-related and they were dead set on controlling employee behavior, they’d also be requiring that people who smoke quit and that people who drink more than the recommended two units of alcohol per day cut back.
If they wanted to simply make employees healthier, they could’ve gone about this really differently. Maybe suggest that the college provide healthy snacks for employees, or at least fill the vending machines with things that are a healthier than the standard chips and chocolate. Maybe they could pay up on the condition that the cafeteria cuts its use of deep frying, offers healthier drink options, reduces the use of products with high fructose corn syrup, and adds (or cuts the price on) a nice salad bar. Offer a discount at a local gym, yoga studio, or masseuse, or offer reduced prices on smoking cessation assistance, counseling, and visits to a nutritionist. There are a lot of things that could be offered–things that have the potential to improve both employee health and morale–but the benefactor has chosen none of these things.
What she’s chosen instead is fat-shaming. She’s chosen to make it clear that the she–and by their acceptance, the college–is more concerned about how people look than about trying to provide them with a healthy work environment and trying to improve their health.
Stephens College is primarily a women’s college–I believe that they admit male grad students, but not undergrads. According to The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, one in five women struggle with an eating disorder or disordered habits. (This is backed up by the National Institute of Mental Health.) 90% of people with eating disorders are women between 12 and 25. Look at those numbers again and think for a minute about how many people–how many young women, how many girls–that is. The message that the college is sending is the same message that these young women are getting from everywhere else: it’s not how you feel about yourself that matters. It’s not how healthy you are, and it’s certainly not your quality of life.
No. What matters is being thin, because fat is bad and unhealthy. Because fat is scary and visible and easy to demonize, so it’s what matters.
I realize that we’re talking about a fairly small amount of weight shared over a presumably large pool of people. The weight loss is probably just a few pounds each. But it’s not what they’re losing that we really need to think about here–we should think about what they’re gaining. They’re gaining a culture in which office culture is synonymous with diet culture. They’re gaining an environment that has the potential to really pit people against each other–dieters vs. non-dieters. We’re talking about a lot of money here, and it’s easy to get people worked up over that. They’re gaining the ability to pressure coworkers into dieting, regardless of how that coworker feels about their own weight, lifestyle, and level of health. Sure, people who disagree could refuse to participate, but let’s be realistic: when you’ve got a hundred people on a diet, and they’re all on it together, and they’re charting the group weight loss, you’re going to have to be a damn strong person to not feel bad–guilty, even–about eating your Friday-afternoon brownie.
The worst part of this for me is that the college president has actively created this environment. The initial offer was made just to her, and she went back and said hey, we’ll collectively lose weight if you’ll donate. Her offer of a “bargain” seems to imply that she initially refused–apparently, a donation to the college wasn’t sufficient reason for her to change her lifestyle and habits. It was, however, sufficient reason to convince most of the staff to do so.
If the donor had suggested that underweight people gain weight, there’s no way that it would have been considered. I doubt, too, that anyone would have undertaken a quest to, say, teach everyone how to knit, nor would a donation contingent upon everyone learning Esperanto go over so well. I don’t think that anyone would have seriously considered a suggestion in which grown adults were made to monitor, report, and reduce their alcohol intake. Or since we’re talking about personal lives here, how about someone will make a donation, but only if the president will spend the next year campaigning in support of a political cause, or maybe spend the next four months having a romantic supper one night a week with the donor–clearly inappropriate, right? But because we’re talking about fat, people seem to feel that it’s okay.
It’s not okay. These people are adults and have the right to determine how they live their lives. If they want to eat healthily and take long walks and not care about their weight, they have the right to do that. If they want to count every calorie and exercise for at least an hour a day, they have the right to do that, too. If they want to live off of jelly doughnuts and coffee, they can. They can ride motorcycles without protective gear, they can stay with abusive partners, they can choose to become a hermit, they can drink until they vomit five nights a week. Most of this is not healthy behavior, but it’s still something that they’re entitled to choose, and unless they’re vomiting in your shoes, it’s none of your business what they’re doing.
Neither is it the business of some anonymous donor, regardless of how much money the donor’s willing to pay for that privilege.
While the fat-shaming aspects of this are so sad and offensive, there are other concerns that I have as well. As an employer, I don’t believe you have any right to ask your employees to lose weight. Even encouraging weight-loss from your employees is a tricky area. The University will have to be very careful of not seeming discriminatory against employees with possible health conditions. Especially when you target weight-loss and ignore other healthy actions as you mention.
Plus, the only one that should be telling you to get on a diet is your doctor. There are a number of health issues that cause weight gain. Diets can sometimes be more risky to one’s health than staying at your same weight.
Overall, this is a shameful situation. I love your breakdown of the issues.