A Canadian college has a full-scale controversy on its hands.
The decision to remove a scale from Ottawa’s Carleton University gym so students won’t obsess over their weight has generated angry debate, the CBC reported Sunday.
The dispute began earlier this month when students noticed a sign had replaced the scale, saying it was removed “in keeping with current fitness and social trends,” the school newspaper the Charlatan noted.
“We don’t believe being fixated on weight has any positive effect on your health and well-being,” Bruce Marshall, the manager of health and wellness, said in an email to the Charlatan. “The body is an amazing machine and even when we are dieting and training it will often find a homeostasis at a certain weight. .. So why obsess about it?”
Freshman Samar El Faki supported the move. “Scales are very triggering,” she said, per the Charlatan. “I think people are being insensitive because they simply don’t understand. They think eating disorders are a choice when they are actually a serious illness.”
The CBC noted a similar argument in a post it screen-captured on social media.
But many critics, using the hashtag #bringbackthescale, have lashed out at the move.
In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Marshall encouraged those with fitness goals to use other standards to measure improvement.
“If you have strength goals, try not to keep track of your bodyweight but rather the weight that you are lifting in different exercises each week,” he said.
Give the guy credit for not letting the issue scale down his sense of humor. In telling the newspaper that the fitness center might reconsider its decision, he said, “We will weigh the pros and cons.”
The Huffington Post reached out to Marshall, other school officials and El Faki for comment.
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