Why BMI is flawed – and how to redefine obesity
Here is my biggest problem:<p>I&#x27;m fat. It&#x27;s that simple, I&#x27;m fat. Why am I fat? Because I ate too much and exercised too little.<p>Why did I eat too much and exercise too little? Well, there&#x27;s not really one reason; portion size norms are kind of bad here, I ate a lot at night, I stress-eat sometimes, and my upbringing didn&#x27;t instill good exercise or eating habits for the most part. Doesn&#x27;t really matter <i>that</i> much, at least not in my case.<p>How do I know that I am fat? By looking down. I have fat all over my body. And I&#x27;ve lost <i>a lot</i> of weight recently, but I can look down and see that there is more to go before I am rid of the remainder of clearly excess fat on my body. I understand that some people do have a tendency to eating disorders and a distorted view of themselves, but that&#x27;s not a problem I&#x27;ve ever had, so I&#x27;m fine relying on my own senses.<p>So needless to say, I don&#x27;t really give a shit about BMI. I think most people ought not put that much stock into it, because most people can, if they&#x27;re being honest with themselves, tell if they&#x27;re overweight by looking in a mirror.<p>But... I think that if anything, the big problem with most people is not that people are too concerned with BMI, it&#x27;s that people are not concerned enough about the side-effects of their terrible diets and lack of exercise. I do not think that our standards are overall too high, I think our standards are too <i>low</i>, at least here in America. Granted, I&#x27;m not exactly a health nut, but seriously: when I was talking to my mother, and I said I have a goal to get down to at least 180 lbs, she thought I would look anorexic at 180 lbs. I had to show her pictures of people who weigh 180 lbs to get her to believe that that&#x27;s a completely reasonable target weight.<p>Some segment of the population definitely are too obsessed with BMI and weight loss, and probably the same for some health specialists. But for all of the hand-wringing about that issue, and movements like HAES, somehow people seem to miss the part that your horribly unhealthy habits are not more healthy just because BMI is an estimate and not some sort of absolute fact. Just taking a shot in the dark, if your BMI is &gt;35, I would guess that regardless of the population-level inaccuracies of BMI, it&#x27;s very likely a good indicator of an unhealthy lifestyle, or at least, a dramatically unusual physique. If I am wrong, I&#x27;d love to know.<p>But what&#x27;s more important is not eating absurd portions of junk food every day, and getting up and walking once in a while. The whole culture here of &quot;dieting&quot; as a thing you do to lose weight rather than as a lifestyle adjustment is crazy. I know it&#x27;s kind of cliche by now, but as someone who mostly ignored this sort of thing for years, even I must admit that my view of what a healthy diet and lifestyle looked like was very distorted by weird American cultural things. Amusingly, the only thing that actually opened my eyes to a lot of it was realizing how much I <i>didn&#x27;t</i> agree with some of the things that HAES advocates on the Internet said. In a roundabout way, it helped me stop rationalizing my weight problems internally and realizing that my weight problems were <i>lifestyle</i> problems, by virtue of almost spite.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how much of a hot or cold take this rant was, because I generally do my best to avoid reading too many online flame wars about lifestyle things, so I apologize ahead of time if this rant is just full of either flamebait or cliches, I genuinely do. But, this article really annoys me, because wow, I don&#x27;t understand how BMI continues to be such a massive source of concern as obesity continues killing the shit out of us and ruining our quality of life. I&#x27;m starting to feel like there&#x27;s got to be some crazy conspiracy going on.