I’m Fat, and People Need To Get Over It.
When you deal with the medical system regularly (and when you deal with the general public, people at your gym, people at your school, your friends, your family, your neighbors, etc…) you probably know what an emphasis everyone puts on weight.
You get measured for BMI in public school PE, your doctor probably has it on your chart, and if you’re over (or under) a specific number, you’re going to hear about it. A lot. And there are a TON of reasons why the BMI chart is not scientifically sound in the first place: a few, summarized, you can read here. There are a lot of issues with basing health off of weight, and “ideal weight” off of health. Systems like this often ignore the amount of muscle, bone, water, and fat that your average human has, for example. And then, beyond that, even when you do body mass composition scans (which are way more helpful for health predictors), these numbers fail to take into account quite a few things which have bearing on your weight.
Sure, it’s easy to tell me that there are a string of numbers which should determine my body fat percentage. It ranges anywhere from 10-12% for essential fat to live, up to 31% as the borderline for acceptable edging on overweight. 32% plus is considered overweight. And this number can be helpful to me, because now I know that my body fat percentage is about 35%, at the lower end of overweight. And that tells me, in a truly scientific manner, what my chubby looking body is made up of. It still doesn’t take into consideration a lot of things we should look at when treating a patient: economic status, ethnic background, regional background, genetics, family history, mental illnesses, physical illnesses, comorbidity, or previous healthcare. You can hypothesize about why I’m fat all day long, why anyone is fat or underweight, why any of us are measured by this metric at all- it’s theoretical, and it’s interesting, until it’s you, and then suddenly it isn’t very fun anymore.
