You call it a fat gut, but Maggie-kitten calls it a convenient landing platform
I've been meaning to address some of the comments on my last entry, but I literally haven't had time and net access simultaneously. Anyway, here we go.
The assertion was made--whether to me or to another commenter, I'm not totally sure-- that "making generalizations about BMI being 'bullshit' sounds bitter from someone who isn't actually fit." And I wanted to clarify for my part that I'm not bitter, just irritated.
My complaints about BMI were not meant to be a criticism of American standards of fatness and health per se, but a criticism of BMI as the tool of choice to measure them. Analogously, imagine we lived in a world where a person's score on the SAT was the go-to measurement for how intelligent they are. Aside from the argument of standards as such (ie, using a standardized test to measure intelligence, because there are many different kinds of smarts, not all of them from a book) we can also argue that the SAT is a poor standardized test to use, because it doesn't test science or history or any number of subjects, and doesn't compensate for people with learning disabilities or people who are smart but just do badly on standardized tests.
Likewise, BMI does measure something--the ratio of your height and your weight. So it will sort out between extremes of short and thin, short and heavy, tall and heavy. To a degree. I guess it seems utterly obvious to me that a fatness-fitness measurement that fails to take into account THE GENDER OF THE PERSON is inherently pretty inaccurate. A man and a woman with the same height and weight are still going to carry that weight totally differently, even if you don't take into account other factors like age and frame, which a good measurement should.
I don't need the BMI to tell me I'm fat, because I have the mirror. I also don't need the BMI to tell me I'm morbidly obese, because I have the mirror, which tells me that "morbid obesity" is not the category my body is in. There seems to be a lot of clamor from some quarters for an impartial labeling system, because, it is implied, fat people don't know they're fat, or are at least in really deep denial. The punchline always seems to be that we must not know that we're fat, because of course we'd do something about it! Do people think excess adipose tissue melts your brain cells? Do they not know how bigoted some of their arguments sound? I am going to start firebombing if I have to hear, once again, that hoary old chestnut about some obese person (usually a woman) ordering a gigantic meal at a restaurant and then getting a Diet Coke. "Apparently she thought it would cancel out the calories!" the storyteller chortles. Would you ever say something like, "Boy, black people are idiots about nutrition. I saw a guy loading his plate up with fried chicken and mashed potatoes - and then a little scoop of salad. I guess he thought that's all the vitamins he needs!" No kind person would say that--that's horrifying. But the moralizing and superiority toward fatties goes on and on.
Most everything else I wanted to say can be summed up by two far better writers:
On the health side, Kate Harding in Don't You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy? (particularly points 1 and 2)
On the moralizing side, Juliet Samuel in Fat Pride World Wide
Anyway, that's about it. Back to work.
The assertion was made--whether to me or to another commenter, I'm not totally sure-- that "making generalizations about BMI being 'bullshit' sounds bitter from someone who isn't actually fit." And I wanted to clarify for my part that I'm not bitter, just irritated.
My complaints about BMI were not meant to be a criticism of American standards of fatness and health per se, but a criticism of BMI as the tool of choice to measure them. Analogously, imagine we lived in a world where a person's score on the SAT was the go-to measurement for how intelligent they are. Aside from the argument of standards as such (ie, using a standardized test to measure intelligence, because there are many different kinds of smarts, not all of them from a book) we can also argue that the SAT is a poor standardized test to use, because it doesn't test science or history or any number of subjects, and doesn't compensate for people with learning disabilities or people who are smart but just do badly on standardized tests.
Likewise, BMI does measure something--the ratio of your height and your weight. So it will sort out between extremes of short and thin, short and heavy, tall and heavy. To a degree. I guess it seems utterly obvious to me that a fatness-fitness measurement that fails to take into account THE GENDER OF THE PERSON is inherently pretty inaccurate. A man and a woman with the same height and weight are still going to carry that weight totally differently, even if you don't take into account other factors like age and frame, which a good measurement should.
I don't need the BMI to tell me I'm fat, because I have the mirror. I also don't need the BMI to tell me I'm morbidly obese, because I have the mirror, which tells me that "morbid obesity" is not the category my body is in. There seems to be a lot of clamor from some quarters for an impartial labeling system, because, it is implied, fat people don't know they're fat, or are at least in really deep denial. The punchline always seems to be that we must not know that we're fat, because of course we'd do something about it! Do people think excess adipose tissue melts your brain cells? Do they not know how bigoted some of their arguments sound? I am going to start firebombing if I have to hear, once again, that hoary old chestnut about some obese person (usually a woman) ordering a gigantic meal at a restaurant and then getting a Diet Coke. "Apparently she thought it would cancel out the calories!" the storyteller chortles. Would you ever say something like, "Boy, black people are idiots about nutrition. I saw a guy loading his plate up with fried chicken and mashed potatoes - and then a little scoop of salad. I guess he thought that's all the vitamins he needs!" No kind person would say that--that's horrifying. But the moralizing and superiority toward fatties goes on and on.
Most everything else I wanted to say can be summed up by two far better writers:
On the health side, Kate Harding in Don't You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy? (particularly points 1 and 2)
On the moralizing side, Juliet Samuel in Fat Pride World Wide
Anyway, that's about it. Back to work.