Today, I got up, and started counting calories as soon as I took my first bite of Greek yogurt. I went to the gym for the second day in a row, and felt pretty damn guilty about the slice of cake I ate afterwards.
I want to be thin and healthy, because I’ve been taught that these two things are synonymous.
But now, researchers say that it’s healthier to be overweight. A recent CDC analysis of 97 different obesity studies found that an overweight person is 6% less likely to die prematurely than someone at a “healthy” weight.
A “healthy”—or normal—weight is defined as a Body Mass Index between 18.5 and 24.9, while overweight defines anyone with a BMI between 25 and 29.9. A BMI of 30 or above is obese. But apparently, these numbers are trash; don’t bother memorizing them.
As William Dietz of the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity stated in The Daily Beast in 2009, “We didn’t feel like we could wait for the best possible evidence, so we acted on the best available evidence,” when putting together the BMI.
Thus, the current confusion.
I can finally have my cake and eat it, too. But I reject it—not withstanding the slice from earlier—because I want to fit in, and I have years of previous studies to back me up.
And many of you will probably do the same.
That’s the scariest part of all: even with all this research, and all the research that I’m sure will be following the CDC’s meta-analysis, we still won’t be able to make health a priority. Why? Simply put, society won’t let us put health before decades of established norms.
Thin is in. Thin is very in, and has been since Twiggy hit the modeling stage in the 1960s. And no one even pretended that being skinny—or at least, unnaturally so—could possibly be healthy.
Yet, we’ll keep citing the studies that tell us to be thin, because most of us can’t, in good conscience, do something that we know is as unhealthy as starving ourselves. We need another reason.
We’ll need to keep telling ourselves that thin is healthy, because society won’t accept us if we’re anything but. Otherwise we’d be ostracized from many social circles. Our waistlines are a sign of prestige and class—wasn’t it Wallis Simpson who said, “You can never be too rich, or too thin,”?
And a low weight makes us more desirable to both sexes—or so we’re taught from the day we started playing with Barbie and watching Disney movies.
Our bodies are a status symbol, and we need to starve in order to earn our bread—literally. Employers still prefer not to hire or promote overweight individuals.
So the choice is simple: be healthy and never have to tack the term “guilt-free” onto dessert ever again—because it’s assumed—or have friends, admirers, dates and jobs. See? Simple.
We want, no, need a reason to be thin. We can’t say we’re dieting because of peer pressure or because, even with “curvy” starlets like Sofia Vergara and Beyoncé gracing the stage (these starlets are also quite thin), we need our waist lines to dip down to a perfect 24”. We need science to back up our insanity.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this new research. In fact, I wrote an article against putting weight before health back in 2010. But it’s three years later, and in that time I’ve had to contend with three years worth of articles extoling the importance of being thin.
These articles weren’t just about aesthetics. Every day, I’d open the health section of the newspaper and learn about all the new cancers I would get if I were to gain weight. And every magazine would feature stories linking a few extra pounds to every disease known to man or woman.
I blame this pseudo-research for making me count every calorie and feel guilty about eating a cupcake. I blame every cancer-scare article for the hunger I endured going from borderline overweight to my “optimal” weight, and I regret reading so many health articles—not because the reporting was wrong, but because the research was faulty. Because, now that I’m at my optimal weight, I have virtually no curves and sitting can be unpleasant.
This part is completely anecdotal. But along the same vein, I have to ask: how many of you have seen people over eighty who were healthy and thin? It seems that the ones who are most robust tend to have some extra padding.
You might want to cross “losing weight” off your to-do list because it’s such an onerous resolution. But could you really go through with it? Could you actually stop counting calories and worrying that the extra junk in the trunk or spare tire will lead to poor health?
I read the new study. I wrote about BMI in 2010. And I’m convinced that having a little extra is healthy.
But frankly, I don’t know that I could cross “losing weight”—or maintaining a thin physique—off my list.