Can we all agree the BMI is bullshit?

This is a picture of my husband. His name is Josh. He’s 30 years old and he’s adorable. Bear with me; this isn’t a blog about how cute my husband is.

On any given week, Josh follows a pretty regular routine of eating and exercise. If a doctor were to look his food and movement routine, I think they’d give him two thumbs up. He’s a regular runner, averaging a run 5 days a week along with a quick workout with weights. He eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. He eats balanced meals of proteins, carbohydrates and fats. During the work week, you can almost bet your life that Josh will order a salad for lunch. He limits his caffeine intake and drinks a ton of water.

Yet the minute Josh steps on the scale at a doctor’s office, he’s deemed “unhealthy.” According to our trusty measure of health in this country, the BMI scale – Josh falls into the “overweight” category based on his height and weight (the only two variables taken into account to measure BMI). Sign, sealed, delivered; Josh is unhealthy. Don’t take anything into consideration related to his gender, his genetics, his environment, his socioeconomic status or his access to food. Just make the simple assumption that if his BMI is high, he’s unhealthy.

Since this enrages me, I decided one day to calculate out how much weight Josh would have to lose in order to fall into the normal category. I was shocked when I plugged in the numbers. To fall at highest end of the “normal” range – Josh would need to lose TWENTY POUNDS. TWENTY!!! That’s TWO, ZERO. Look at that picture of him again. Twenty pounds off of him is LUDACRIS.

The BMI is an outdated, and honestly an erroneous scale to determine someone’s health. Adolphe Quetelt, a Belgian mathematician, originally developed the BMI in the late 19th century. It’s so old, his picture is sketched because cameras were a new commodity. I’m not sure about anybody else, but the fact that we are using an outdated (to say the least) measure to STILL determine health is a bit scary. When Adolphe created the BMI scale, things like peg legs, killing lice with gasoline and using mercury to treat Syphilis were happening. Come on people, this shit is ancient.

Yet, here we are in 2018 – and we are still using a faulty scale to determine health. It’s time to recognize that punching 2 numbers into a calculator and coming to the conclusion of “healthy!” or “not healthy!” is ridiculous.

As it turns out, according to a UCLA study published in the International Journal of Obesity, nearly half of overweight individuals and 29% of obese individuals were metabolically healthy even though they would traditionally be classified as unhealthy based solely on their weight. The BMI is completely misleading.

So can we all agree that the BMI is bullshit? It’s been discounted over and over. It’s old. It’s boring. And frankly, it’s discriminatory.

Photo Credit of Josh: The Uttke Duo