28th Dec 2006
Does This Blog Make Me Look Fat?
I’ve been busting a nut in recent years to stay in shape. I bike to work and/or hit the gym a few times a week when I can, and I do my best to eat right. (Okay, I did just move on to raw cookie dough this evening after already feeling guilty for consuming too many Xmas cookies.) For a man of my advanced years (41), I feel like I do pretty well.
Then I run into this lying sack of shit web page that purports to calculate your BMI (body mass index) based on your weight and height. In the interest of revealing way too much personal information on this blog, I’m somewhere between 5′11″ and 6′ and 170 to 175 lbs (weirdly, I normally weigh in at 172, my old street address growing up which is a number I seem to notice everywhere). According to aforementioned lyingsackofshit.com, that puts me a gerbil fart away from being “overweight.”
This chart on Wikipedia wants me to weigh between 130 and 170 to be “normal” weight. Let’s call it 150. WTF? “Normal”? As is, normative? The norm? Granted, we Amerikans are buckets of grease with legs compared to most of the rest of the world (though thank goodness they all seem to be following in our butt-chaffing waddle), but I used to be a scrawny kid, and I haven’t weighed 150, much less 130, since junior high school.
I see from Wikipedia the index was invented somewhere around 1830 to 1850, back when 6″ was a circus freak. Isn’t it time that the FDA or USDA or one of those other helpful organizations that tells us to eat heaping helpings of carbs every day and that cloned cows are good for us (mmm, clony) should revisit this thing?
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Rick, I’ve been following your writing for a while — great stuff. Just to beat on BMI further, I would add that the calculations are based on absolute mass and do not take into account bodyfat (BF) percentage. At 5′ 8″, I walk around at about 170 lbs. and 12-14% (BF), which places me about “normal” via BMI calculations. When I was competing in sports, I weighed 225 at 8% BF and was “severly overweight”! Ridiculous. My thighs may have been chafing, but I wasn’t obese.
The FDA and governmental council on nutrition are a joke, as all of their suggestions are based on the nutritional needs of the “average” sedentary American, who is clinically obese. Walk through Philly sometime for a good 365 rotoscope of morbid obesity. That is who the good ol’ government is using as a measuring stick.
Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) are not ideal quantities for maximum physical performance but the minimums necessary to prevent disease! If any decent weekend warrior gets just 80g of protein per day (often prescribed without reference to lean bodyweight), their body will eat itself. Hello, catabolism.
Sorry about the rant, but this topic is a sore spot for me. I have worked with about 50 pro or Olympic athletes and have seen inside the machine. Misinformation from ignorance is bad enough, but the pre-meditated dissemination of disinformation to suit lobbying interests is just atrocious.
at (a slimmish) 182 and 5 feet 11 and 1/2 inches, i’m weighing in heavily on your side of the debate.