BMI Confession

I ran to the on-site clinic at work today to see if the PA could tell me why I have this incessant earache. As I was waiting for her to arrive, I was looking at a "healthy body weight" poster on the wall. Since I had some time to kill, I borrowed a pen and Post-it note to do the calculations for my BMI and suggested caloric intake.

The BMI calculators available online are plentiful, so I'm not going to give you the equation. It's supposed to be a good guideline for where you are ... essentially height divided by weight (with some fancy math gymnastics in there). So in my head, it's really a proportion thing. Seems like a great idea.

Seems like a great idea until I plug in my numbers in, that is. Right up until the point I end up at the very high range of "normal." Knockin' on the door of "overweight."

Still. After all the work, the sweat and the healthy eating.

And it frosts my butt. (As it did in my previous post "BMI Bull$%!#  http://carsickcaravan.blogspot.com/2011/03/bmi-bull.html)

It's frustrating because I feel like I've come so far and, while normal is good, I want a bigger atta' girl. It's also frustrating because I'm pretty consistently wearing a size 4 bottoms. So what it says to me is that size 4 isn't "small enough" and I'm supposed to be a 2. Or smaller. Which seems ridiculous to the remnants of my size 20 head. It's also frustrating because I can't tell which one of those things bother me more.

And it makes me think about the rest of the world ... if the average American woman is a size 14, and getting bigger, are ALL of those people REALLY not healthy at all? Can that be right? Who decides this healthy thing anyway?

Now, I know I'm not "thin" like a teenager. I know BMI is just a number and everyone's body is different. I know normal is good and I'm a hell of a lot better off than I was before.

But it's easy to get discouraged. Had I seen this BMI thing at the beginning of the road, would I have thought it was too far to go and been too psyched out or afraid to try?

I'm not sure.