Hi friend,
I'm taking some time off, so your next Body Liberation Guide will appear in your inbox on Monday, May 15. If you're hungry for more BLG before then, check out the
archives.
Now for this week's letter:
Let's talk about football players and BMI.
When the topic of body mass index, or BMI, comes up, one of the first responses is usually someone pointing out that some very obviously muscular and fit people -- like football players -- are considered obese* by BMI measurements.
And thus, the argument goes, BMI is a problem because it classifies people who are healthy as unhealthy, so it's inaccurate. It's also the source of a lot of what mainstream discomfort exists around BMI.
If you're fussed about BMI miscategorizing people, you're right. What you're wrong about is why.
In our culture, not only have we decided that some people are inherently "healthy" or "unhealthy," we've decided that some people are inherently high status or low status.
In this case, these dynamics are connected.
Science and facts aside, we've decided that athletes are inherently both healthy and high status, and fat people are inherently both unhealthy and low status.
When a measure of so-called health like the BMI is applied to an inherently high status and healthy person like a football player, it "incorrectly" miscategorizes them as low status, which is what feels uncomfortable.
A weapon meant to keep low status people low is suddenly being used against someone of high status and that feels bad, man, real bad.
This is a good opportunity to step back and consider why we consider certain people high status/low status, healthy/unhealthy in the first place.
Football players and other athletes are subject to all sorts of injuries and long-term body damage, yet they're considered inherently healthy. There's no particular science that proves that fat people are inherently unhealthy, yet we are considered low status.
Living in a fat body is correlated with elevated risk for certain health conditions, but we don't actually know yet whether that's due to the fatness of the body, or the stigma and discrimination that body is subjected to.
However, we know for certain that the ravages of athletics on bodies are caused by the athletics. Athletes can stop doing the things that cause damage to their bodies, but we don't have a way to make fat people not fat in the long term. And yet it's only the low status people who are expected to somehow change themselves and stop being low status.
*Like many fat activists, I consider the o-words (overweight and obese) to be slurs and don't generally use them, but am using the term here to reflect how these bigoted terms are used in medical contexts.
