Thinking more about the fat thing (ha, I wrote phat first, which is funny) because it’s irking me. I watched a few minutes of a Dr. Mike video in which he talked about BMI. He was careful to say that it’s just a tool and that blah, blah, blah, but then he defended it as legit. I turned off the video because while I find him to be informative and caring in general, even he has bowed down to the myth of BMI.
It’s so fucking frustrating how deep run fat phobia is in this country. The undercurrent of what Dr. Mike was saying was that it’s wrong to be fat. No matter how carefully he put it, that was his message.
And it’s all bullshit. This I know. BMI was never meant to be ussed for individuals. The guy who came up with it has said it himself. He was a mathmetecian (!) and it was supposed to be a quick and dirty way to judge the obesity of a general population, not an individual. Here’s an article on NPR/MPR explaining why the BMI is bullshit (restraining heated comment on their parting comment on obesity). I especially appreiate the bit about how because of the way the chart is structured, people who are considered obese will often have a high BMI, but correlation is not causation. As the article points out, those who are heavily muscled will have a high BMI. That was me.
The moment I realized that at my skinniest, when I was anorexic and bulimic with a thigh gap and fainting because I wasn’t eating enough calories to not faint, I was still considered on the cusp of overweight was when I knew for sure that BMI was bullshit. Not to mention that the MATHEMATICIAN who came up with it was doing it based on the ‘common man’. Which, yeah. You can understand why that worked out so well. This was early 19th century to boot and a lot has changed since then. So even the bemoaning of how obese Americans are is bullshit beacuse it’s based on BMI.
Putting that genie back in the bottle isn’t going to happen. Anyone mentions BMI without saying it’s bullshit? I don’t listen to them. That’s such a faulty premise that it’s like someone saying that the earth is flat–except it’s given much more gravitas. It’s unthinkingly accepted by the medical community–which is annoying as fuck.
Ita’s easy for me to say it’s bullshit. It’s much harder for me to fully embrace that the obsession with weight that America has is bullshit. But. Even if I can’t do that. Even if I were to agree that Americans need to lose weight, I cannot get aboard the train that shaming and blaming is the way to get Americans to change.
I thought the same thing when the push to make people feel terrible for smoking went full bore. This was right around the turn of the millennium, and the place I worked (county government) made it so you could not smoke inside. I didn’t care. I only smoked out of my home when I went out drinking. I will admit I was a bit miffed when bars went nonsmoking, but that was because Minnesota is fucking frigid in the winter. Which in itself would not be terrible except there were no places to safely smoke outside.
Be that as it may, my issue with the sudden indoor ban of smoking in public places was that it meant that people were huddling around the boors to smoke because that was where the ashtrays were. So if you wanted to get into the building, you had to walk by them. The county got around that by saying people had to smoke 15 feet away from the door, which is fine, but they also said that people could not smoke in their cars if they were doing government work. Their own cars. I thought that was way over the line.
Here’s my biggest issue with the ban. The push around it was focused on how bad smokers were for smoking. It was so bad for them and they were bad people for doing it. I’m not disagreeing that smoking is bad for you–it is. But people were not evil for smoking, and it’s not easy to quit. It’s super hard for many people. It was easy for me, but that was because I was forced to quit by dying twice and being in the hospital for two weeks, one of those weeks unconcious. By the time I got out of the hospital, I had no desire to smoke. Nor would I really have been able to with my parents around. So I didn’t. And never started up again.
Anyway. I saw how people treated smokers. The passersby would glare at the smokers and treat them like pariahs. Snatching their kids and hurrying away, etc. While, all around them, cars belched out smoke and smokestacks extruded the same black smoke. Again, they made it so that the individual smoker was deemed the worst of the worst rather than the corporations or companies.
It’s the same bullshit as recycling, honestly. The corpos put so much emphasis on individual recycling and not reuse and reduce, which have a much greater impact. But notice which one does not cost the corpos money. It would be recycle. Because that means you can buy more stuff! Reuse and reduce are both about not buying more stuff. Boooooo!
So, the similarity I’m drawing with weight is this. It’s easy to say that Americans are lazy and that’s why they’re (we’re!) fat. It’s easy–and it’s wrong. But it’s the way to overlook systemic issues that prevent people from eating ‘better’ and exercising more. I put better in quotes because there is no one way to eat better or well. I don’t believe in the morality of food, but it’s just shorthand for eating more veggies and fruits if you can.
If we were to tackle the issues facing Americans that prevent them from ebing their ‘healthiest’ selves (again, same issues because healthy is in the eye of the beholder), then we have to start with the fact that Americans don’t have enough time. Most people are working more and more hours for less and less money, and they are barely scraping by. Then, add to that the fact that many people live in food deserts. It’s hard to get fresh produce, for example, and in my area, food in the city costs more (with a more limited selection) than the same food in my neighborhood.
As for exercising, it’s hard to squeeze in an hour a day for many people. That’s assuming that there is an exercise that they want to do in the first place. Now, yes, you can just dance around your living room at home. I did that before I started Taiji, and I lifted free weights every other day. But I live alone and have the space and time. I would turn on my boom box (yes, in the days when that was a thing) and just jam out for a few hours. I’d also do crunches and push-ups, plus the free weights. But I had the time (this was the summer before I went to college) and the focus to do it. And it slipped into an eating disorder so there is that.
I have more to say, but I’m done for now. Will pick it back up tomorrow.