MoreThanANumber

by

Why is a number from the 1800s still deciding how healthy I am?

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.

by

More Than A Number

I saw this video by Special K and I absolutely loved it.  It caught my eye because it questions what we use to measure our self worth. In the video, various women go into a denim store looking for jeans. The video opens to a voiceover of women explaining their disdain for shopping for jeans. As it continues the women notice that none of the jeans have a size on it, which then allows the associates to ask to measure the women. In the measurements, the associates don’t mention size 6 or size 12, but radiant, strong, charismatic, stunning or fabulous.  The idea is to show that we are not defined by our weight but by our own personalities and personal idea of worth. I especially enjoyed this commercial because it strayed away from the idea that you’ll feel better or be a better person if you lose weight with a product. The commercial emphasizes that you can be great in any body. It was an interesting take on weight and advertising and to me, it gave me the feeling of acceptance and non-judgment which is what all people should feel about themselves regardless of weight. One woman even states “Not seeing the number is so freeing” and I completely agree with this statement. This is not to say that everyone should wear the same size, but that everyone deserves the same level of quality and comfort regardless of a person’s size or weight. It shouldn’t be a difficult process for certain people because they are bigger than others.