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.