YOUR HEALTH

BMI, Scale Tyranny and Western Culture

The BMI

I have long ago outlined major flaws in the BMI scale used to define healthy weight.  A recent article by Patrick Luciani (co-author of the 2011 XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame) has added new information worth sharing. (G&M, May 13, 2013, A13 “Is the obesity-industry complex making us fat?”)

According to Luciani, the BMI index currently categorizes 62% of all Canadian adults as overweight or obese.  However, he argues, the figure should be closer to 13% – including anorexics.

Such a disparity re: 50% of the population age 18 and over is horrendous and begs the question: why?

Luciani blames the following flaws in today’s BMI index:

1.       It relies on simple scale weight and does not differentiate between fat and muscle.  That is why professional and top-ranked athletes score as obese on the BMI.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog, NHL superstar and daily body builder Sidney Crosby rates obese on the BMI, as do the strongest people in the world, Olympic male and female weight lifters, who have massive muscles below their chests as well as above.

Moreover, muscle is far denser than fat --  by 20% -- and will therefore weigh more.

 

2.       In the late 1990’s, the upper limit of healthy weight was reduced downward on the BMI scale.

For males it dropped from 27.8 and for women from 27.3 to a gender neutral 25 for everyone – instantly making 3,000,000 Canadians overweight at the stroke of a pen!

 

This unisex revision to the BMI is also mindboggling as women and men have different body shapes and women’s bodies store more fat than men as men tend to have more muscle. Large breasts alone add weight men do not have and to ignore such biological differences is most bizarre!

 

3.       Finally, Luciani, although he avoids the term ‘culture’ says some people prefer to be a bit heavy and enjoying eating well. (See more below on Culture).

 

He adds in this regard that new studies show mortality rates are more or less the same for those in the ‘normal’ BMI range as those in the ‘overweight’ category.

 

In fact, recent insurance company data has confirmed what was originally published by insurers in the late 1970s:  you are more likely to live longer if you have an extra 10% of weight, as serve illness and surgery often result in rapid and life-threatening weight loss – unless you started with an ‘extra cushion’.

 

So, forget the BMI and its pseudo-science.  Don’t let your doctor or others in the health/diet industries pull the BMI wool over your eyes.  

It is not just useless, but dangerous as a yardstick!

 

Tyranny of the Scale

We have gotten into the routine of daily weigh-ins thanks to the availability of cheap and small home scales. Usually the weigh-in is done in the morning after using the toilet (to expel excess waste).

Unfortunately, this daily routine – especially favoured by women -- often leads to shock, trauma and tears.   An extra pound or two and the person starts her or his day upset and grumpy – a downer that can linger for hours.

Put simply, daily weigh-ins is a bad idea because it assumes 4 things:

1.       You eat the same or almost the same foods/calories each day and at the same times day after day. 

 

Having a supper at 9:30 p.m. rather than the usual 6:30 or 7:00 p.m. will make a difference as food has less time to digest and be ‘expelled’ the next morning.  So you end up with extra scale weight.

Heaven forbid you went to a fancy dinner or party, ate gourmet calories galore and drank alcohol (high in calories) and got home at 3:00 a.m.   Your next morning scale reading would be a disaster; unless, of course, you threw up all that extra weight.

 

2.       Your ‘waste’ system – pee and poop – is regular and daily. 

 

If you tend to evacuate your solids only every two or three days or suffer from a bout of constipation, or retain water during your monthly cycle (i.e., that bloated feeling), expect your scale reading to jump until you can ‘re-balance’ your system with a good flush.

 

3.       You have the same level of daily exercise – to burn off calories/weight -- throughout the four seasons of the year.

               If you, like me, exercise less in the winter – I am not into skating or skiing – then you will gain 5% or more in weight.  That extra fat is nature’s normal way of increasing insulation against the cold of winter.  In the summer’s heat, sweat and outdoor activities will naturally cause weight loss.

 

           4.You get more or less the same amount of sleep day after day – as this is a major ‘digestion’ period for getting ‘waste’ ready for expulsion in the morning.

              Experts now recommend adults get 7-8 hours; teens 9.25 hours and kids under thirteen get 10+ hours.

 

So, if you feel compelled to check your precise weight, do so only once a week Wednesday morning.

Why Wednesday?   Because it allows weekend partying, drinking and other binging to have a few days to ‘rebalance’ your system and weight.

 

And you can always do the simple, machine-free test taught by Phys. Ed teachers:

Stand in front of a mirror and pinch the skin at your waist/belly button between thumb and index finger.  If the bulge height is about one inch (2.5 cm) your weight is fine and normal.  If much less, your body has ‘low fat’ and you are either an athlete or anorexic.  If you have between 1” and 2” you have some extra fat.   Only worry and cut back your eating or routines if the height is 3” or more.

 

 

Western Culture’s concept of beauty

Although Luciani does not use the word culture, it is a factor in what people accept as a good weight – especially as it applies to the female body.

Since the invention of the bikini in 1946 and its ubiquitous popularity since the 1960s a new image of the female body beautiful has taken hold of Western Culture.

The bikini leave no room to cover up any excess stomach, hips or thighs.  It is unforgiving of even any extra flesh which automatically bulges around the midrift and leg openings of its bottom.

This new, idealized gaunt look below the chest is displayed prominently on the covers ( and inside) of women’s fitness magazines, women’s ‘health’ and dieting magazines, and the summer issues of every women’s fashion magazine. It is preached by Sport’s Illustrated’s swimsuit spectacular and any men’s magazines from GQ to Maxim to Playboy and the rest.

 

 However, this body image is NOT what has been the ideal sex goddess look for nearly all of the over two millennia of Western Culture.

For a 1000 years, Greek and Roman images of Aphrodite/Venus, the young goddess of love and sexual lust, always displayed her as having a rounded belly, full hips and fleshy thighs.  Just check Google images under Aphrodite – including the Venus de Milo.

Nudes from the Renaissance to modern times have continued this fleshy ideal.  Just Google Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Eve, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, or look at the Google images for: Rubens, Rembrandt, Modigliani, Goya, Cezanne, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and abstract artist Picasso!

No bikini babe in the lot, and all candidates for Weight Watchers!!!!

 

Even when dressed in heavy fabrics, the idealized young women of the Middle Ages were visibly fleshy – as indicated by their full faces.  For example, the Mona Lisa!

 

20^th century May West was no thin stick, nor Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Jane Russell or Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Marilyn Monroe, regularly deemed the most beautiful and sexy women of the mid-century, was a size 12 to 14, and her fleshy body is immortalized in the live footage of her Happy Birthday song to John F. Kennedy (easily found on the internet).

 

So, in the last 60 years we has deviated from the traditional image of female beauty in Western Culture and, thanks to the bikini and a medical profession fixated on thinness, created untold pain, tears and daily attempts to defy one’s natural body -- for a look that is, by historical standards, abnormal and far from the ideal.