Did you have to announce your weight in front of your classmates in your education classes?

Hi!

I was mostly looking forward to my education classes until I found out that I will have to announce my weight every week in front of the entire class. Did anyone else have to do this and if so, did you find it helpful and how did it help you? My dietitian thinks it sounds like weight shaming, she does not approve of this practice. I find the idea humiliating and an invasion of privacy, so I am wondering if I am missing something about why this might be helpful.

Thanks!

My nutrition and psychology groups were the opposite. We weighed ourselves every time, but then wrote it on a slip of paper with our name and handed it to the person running the class. Disclosing the information to everyone else (or not) was up to us.

Hi Roselane:

I would not like to announce my weight in front of a group at all! In fact, that would make me want to skip the education classes that are so important for successful weight loss after surgery!

It reminds me of the humiliation I felt during elementary and junior high school. I was always heavier than most people in my classes in school. Every year in gym class, each pupil was weighed in front of the class and the weight was loudly announced from the person weighing the student to the adult recording the weights. Sometimes one of the adults would make a comment to me like "Oh, you gained a lot of weight since last year!" I would just slink away and there was no where to hide.

In elementary school, the gym classes were co-ed. I would feel so embarrassed when I weighed more than a lot of the boys who were taller than me! In junior high, it wasn't much better with all girls. There was a bunch of them who were catty and gossipers. I can still feel the dread I had for those weigh-in days and the shame I felt each time I was weighed.

I don't see any motivating or helpful reason to announcing your weight to the group at all. In fact, I was always afraid to go to Weigh****chers because I heard you had to be weighed in front of the group before each meeting. To this day, I don't know if that is true.

I hope you can speak to the coordinator of your education classes and express your concerns about this practice. Perhaps, they will excuse you from this or even change their policy!

Not true about weigh****chers. They do weigh you in front of a line of people waiting to be weighed, but the weight shows up on a monitor that only the person who is weighing you can see. In my experience, they are very discrete.

That may be how WW does it now, but back in the day, they sure did weigh you in front of everyone and announce it. I suffered through one horrible WW meeting because a friend wanted me to join with her back in the 80s. After that humiliating experience, I never went back. Glad to hear it has changed.

Similar to Cathy, that wasn't my experience and I was in WW's as recently as 2012-2015. The scale they used was just a typical digital scale.

No, when I did my classes last year this was not part of it -- we didn't share our weight but we did talk about our goals for the future and obviously some of that involved disclosing #s -- but that level of detail was voluntary.

I actually never disclosed my highest weight to anyone other than my medical team until I posted it in my signature here.

we never did that, either. I wouldn't have liked that *at all* - I was obviously the heaviest person in my class, so I would have felt really self-conscious about that. And yes - it does kind of sound like fat shaming.

Sounds like shaming to me! I haven't had that done to me since I was in elementary school and the nurse weighed us as a group (and would comment that I was heavier than I should be).

LIZ - I cry, for those young girls, we used to be !

I VIVIDLY remember the 5th grade...Mrs. Colvin...hope she had a wretched death...She weighed us at the front of the room...and wrote our weights on the CHALKBOARD...

When it was my turn, she yelled out (or I thought she yelled) "GINA GAYLE, YOU WEIGH MORE THAN I DO"...I will forever remember that I weighed 121 lbs, and 50 lbs of that was shame...