The BMI post

Hey!  Long time no write.  I've been working, cooking, and receiving a slew of impersonal mass apologies just in time for Yom Kippur.  Although, some one made the good point in my hippy-dippy non-denominational synagogue today that it's not necessarily a bad thing to "exercise your apology muscle" and remind yourself that you have a huge capacity to forgive.  And I think I understand forgiveness for misdeeds better than atonement for sins.  Jewish thought for the day.

Also - since I'm fasting - I'm more attuned to the idea of fat people being chided whenever they are spotted eating.  This morning, I was sitting next to a man who half-jokingly was telling us about how he will weigh himself for Weight Watcher's tonight before break fast.

He can joke, but there is a very real trend of a high incidence of eating disorders among fat people.  Eating disorders are not a new phenomenon in this culture.  There are many different types of mainstream medical professionals who work with eating disordered patients.  And yet all too many of these people have encouraged overweight patients to starve and purge themselves.

Because apparently, you can only have an eating disorder if you have a "normal" BMI.

It's hard to rally laypeople's attitudes around medical science.  But it sickens me, the number of licensed medical professionals that are complicit in favoring the BMI - a quick 19th century formula to determine the average weight proportional to height (according to this 2009 NPR report, in order to determine the allocation of resources to the population) over the urgent psychological/health care that these people really need.

And the BMI's own website is upfront about some of the its shortcomings, but in this society, where invoking the BMI has become a shorthand for determining the be-all end-all of a person's health, I thought it would be useful to talk about some widespread BMI misconceptions.  Namely,

The people with "obese" BMIs look like the headless fatties.

Blogger and fat activist Kate Harding founded the BMI project.  You can read her concise guest post on Shakesville.  To sum it up:




According to BMI, this woman is overweight.  She wears a size 4.

And compare these two women:



(Joy, 5'8", 224 lbs.), "obese with high risk of associated disease", and



(Fillyjonk, 5'7", 225 lbs., one inch shorter and one pound heavier), "obese with very high risk of associated disease".

Also, since BMI does not distinguish between relative bone, fat, and muscle density, then, according to the NPR report, "a person with strong, bones, good muscle tone, and low fat will have a high BMI."  I know I already made this point in my post about Cheryl Haworth, but these olympic athletes clearly have widely varying BMIs:

courtesy roundshape.wordpress.com

Okay, in the meantime, I enthusiastically refer you once more to the NPR report, remind you that our societ's blind hatred of fat often causes us to accept oversimplified explanations to justify that hatred, and advise you to be wary in the future when you hear about the BMI referenced as a health ideal.  Especially if a person who does not have an average BMI is creaking under the pressure of society and killing themselves with disordered eating habits to get there.