Throwing BMI out the window

 

As a young female college athlete, I have constantly struggled with body image issues. Since stepping up into the collegiate level my body has been pushed to extreme levels and has gone through many changes. In high school I was a petite young girl who had a hard time gaining weight. Since I’ve gotten to college my team has shifted the focus to exercises that enhance explosiveness and agility, both of which require you to target muscle groups in the lower body. I’ve been able to put on muscle really fast, especially in my legs. When you're constantly working out and lifting and trying to be strong you definitely bulk up and for most girls, they think that’s a very unattractive look to a certain point. Many people have made comments towards my body, noticing that my legs have grown and I have gained weight. While this has heightened my insecurities I have been trying to keep in mind that regardless of how much I weigh and how I look, I am healthy.

According to blog nutritionist, Colleen Christensen, we should be following HAES. "It stands for Health At Every Size, and it supports the idea that our health and wellness are not defined by our pant size, scale weight, or BMI. It's a weight-neutral approach to health that focuses on health-promoting practices and body diversity rather than previous weight-focused goals. The HAES movement encourages people to appreciate and accept people of all shapes and sizes, understanding that our health is not influenced by our physical size or shape and has no number value."

In general, it promotes the idea that you can be healthy no matter what size you are.  It backs up what we already know about dieting and weight loss not being good for our health and takes away the notion that skinny is what makes you beautiful and healthy. 

So, some may want to be of a different size because we are told by society that it will make us healthier, but in reality we are harming ourselves and fighting against our body’s natural size. We were made to exist in different sizes. Assigning a disease such as obesity to a body size that is perfectly healthy is dehumanizing and promotes weight stigmatizing behaviors.

BMI has somehow become a proxy for measuring health by assigning people categories of underweight, normal, overweight, obese, and morbidly obese. “BMI is derived from a simple math formula. Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised it in the 1830s". (Why are we even still following this when tons of new research has emerged about our bodies). This formula does not measure your health status, it can't. Why? Well to start BMI does not differentiate between our muscles and fat.

So, someone who is more physically active and has more muscle (Such as an athlete) might have a higher BMI than someone who does not, yet does that make them less healthy? Not at all. Not only can BMI not measure muscle and fat it also can't measure one's blood pressure, metabolic blood panel, hormones, stress level, or sleeping habits.

HAES promotes health policies that improve access to care, remove weight stigma, and encourage people to engage in intuitive eating and joyful activity activities by emphasizing acceptance and respect for all bodies of all sizes. The HAES strategy works when it comes to improving health and health outcomes: “Additional comprehensive HAES interventions that have been evaluated include a study showing that HAES group members maintained weight and improved metabolic fitness (e.g., blood pressure and lipids), energy expenditure, eating behavior, and psychology (e.g., self-esteem, depression, and body image)”.

It’s important to acknowledge that what feels good for you and works for you does not necessarily feel good and work for other people. Many people’s bodies will always be larger, many people’s bodies will always be smaller, and those bodies are no more or less worthy than yours. We do not exist relative to other people. There are people who are eating and exercising in what has been labeled the “ideal” way, and they are still in larger bodies. There are people who engage in behaviors that you may not deem “healthy” yet they are still in smaller bodies. We cannot make assumptions about people based on their body sizes. We cannot use ourselves or anyone else as an ideal and compare ourselves to other people.

MediLexicon International. (n.d.). How useful is body mass index (BMI)? Medical News Today. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/255712

Penney, T. L., & Kirk, S. F. L. (2015, May). The health at every size paradigm and obesity: Missing empirical evidence may help push the reframing obesity debate forward. American journal of public health. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4386524/

Christensen, C. (2020, October 8). Can really you be healthy at every size? (Haes explained!). Colleen Christensen Nutrition. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from https://colleenchristensennutrition.com/haes-explained/