“Eat right and get plenty of exercise and if you do you will be healthy”. That is what the health experts of yesteryear told us. Well today they have slightly modified it. A few years back they came up with a system called the body mass index or BMI (for the busy people among us). The BMI is calculated using a persons weight and height and will inform them if they are underweight, a proper weight, overweight, obese or “about to die”.
A second of thought should reveal the major flaw in this system. Think back to fourth grade P.E. class when Mr. Harris told the class that ______ weighs more than fat. The whole class was stunned because fat people are very heavy. If you could not fill in the blank it was “muscle”. Now if someone is muscular and calculates their BMI it will put them, at the very least, in the overweight category. In researching this, I entered the heights and weights of several famous people. George W. Bush, our most fit President ever, as he has been declared, has been deemed overweight. Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics had a number that was too high and Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys is well on his way to obesity. Of all the heights and weights for professional athletes that I entered, only one fit in the normal range and it was Lance Armstrong.
In thinking a little more about the BMI and the people who came up with it, a very good question pops into my mind. Why do you need to have an index number tell you if you are unhealthy, can you not just look at your nasty body? The only situation I can think of is that someone is blind and cannot use their hands to feel the lard growing on them. I surmise that the BMI people came up with the system out of boredom, because they are nutritionists and Sesame Street has been doing their job for them for a few decades. “Eat vegetables. Stop shoving burgers in your face.” That kind of thing. Or maybe they thought that announcing a new way to calculate exactly how lazy and gluttonous we are would scare some people into changing.
On the other hand, as a former “obese/about to die” category member I will tell you this – “Use your eyes and your brain.” I was 325 lbs. and thought that my extremely high BMI number didn’t mean much because I had a good amount of muscle too. I didn’t take into account that a lot of that muscle was hanging over my belt. And who was I kidding I hadn’t lifted weights in years. (By the way, Dont worry about my BMI I used this video to trim down.)
I have come to the conclusion that if you get paid to play a sport that doesn’t involve a bicycle or bowling pins you can ignore the BMI. Everyone else can still ignore it because we have things like mirrors and small children to tell us we are fat.
