Every doctor’s appointment I’ve ever had starts the same way: shoes off, step on the scale, wait for the number. Then comes the math, height and weight run through a formula, and out pops a category that somehow gets to speak for my whole body before I’ve said a word.
That “formula” is BMI, and what I didn’t know until I started digging into it is that it was never built for this. It came from a Belgian mathematician, not a doctor, who was trying to describe the “average” person across a population. It was never meant to size up one individual. It only really became a go-to health screening tool in the 1970s, which means we’ve been leaning on a very old idea for a very personal question.
What gets me is everything it can’t see. BMI can’t tell muscle from fat, where weight sits on the body, or how someones heart, blood sugar, or sleep are doing. Someone can land in the “overweight” category with perfect bloodwork while someone in the “normal” range struggles with nobody checking. In 1998, the cutoff for “overweight” was lowered, and millions of Americans were reclassified overnight without a single body changing. I started thinking about BMI as a photo taken from too far away. It’s fine for a crowd, but useless for a face. It gives you the outline but completely skips the person, and then we act like the outline is the whole story.
So why do we keep treating it like a verdict or something thats so final? I think its because a number is easier to read on paper than a person.
And until that changes, a lot of people will keep walking out of appointments feeling measured, but not heard.
I genuinely can’t stand how much of a damaging metric BMI is. I agree and it’s crazy how it was designed initially to measure population averages yet now is being used as an individual level. You would think there would be more wide efforts into deconstructing this, but because it’s used in medical fields there’s less questioning. The reclassification part you mentioned is so telling and they feel as a way to combat people with different bodies outside of a “normal range”. But in reality, there are so many reasons as to why a person has the body they have. This post made me look it up to find more about the index and in the sponsored results was a “BMI Caluclator for Women” and “Womens Health Care” which is another whole set of implications that this metric implies. It feels as if it’s become something more societally “beneficial” than actually something that used as a way to measure health in people. This metric really does feel like they put physical visibility on a pedestal then completlely disreguard the patient’s social and mental wellbeing.
The BMI metric system is something that is completely outdated, and it needs to stop dictating how doctors treat their patient. The minute a person’s BMI is higher than what it says it should be a doctor starts telling you to lose weight. You can go in for a sore throat and end up with a lecture about your weight if your BMI is too high. The way the world focuses on it makes it seem like the ultimate scale that determines health, when in reality it is not. It is extremely frustrating.