*Trigger Warning for readers who struggle with overexercise or orthorexia. Please be cautious and mindful about how the discussion below might affect you. 

This is Part 2. Read Part 1 of this “Healthy  Redefined” Series HERE!

In a world where health successes and failures are too often measured entirely by weight loss or weight gain, we have to seriously reconsider this idea. Fitness researchers prove it: “There is a need to increase knowledge and understanding of the health benefits of exercise, and reduce the emphasis on weight loss. This agrees with the evidence that cardiorespiratory fitness is a more powerful predictor of risk than body weight” (1). How often do we see health advice that promises you will “Lose 10 lbs. by Friday!” or “Shrink your belly bulge!” if you’ll begin some exercise program or make healthier food choices? Constantly. This messed-up way of thinking – equating healthy choices with quick weight loss – is seriously hurting our health. It’s also making lots of people LOTS of money, while our health problems are still killing us.

Experts are warning against this profit-driven tendency to focus on thinness rather than actual indicators of health and fitness. In a fantastically-titled paper – “Beneficial effects of exercise: shifting the focus from body weight to other markers of health” – King et al. (2009) conclusively demonstrated that “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower-than-expected exercise-induced weight loss.”

Sounds crazy, right? It goes against anything most media will every tell you about health, but it’s true. Even when you don’t lose as much weight as you think you should (and as money-making media train you to think), you’re still likely gaining some serious health benefits. Doctors know this is true. When people with serious health issues like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular issues and high blood pressure start a meaningful exercise program, their health problems often  disappear or greatly improve – regardless of whether or not they remain overweight or obese.

The Society for Nutrition Education produced a report in 2002 promoting healthy weight in children, which emphasized the need to “set goals for health, not weight, as appropriate for growing children” and says that it is “unrealistic” to expect all children to be at an ideal weight range. Instead, this report defines “healthy weight” as “the natural weight the body adopts, given a healthy diet and meaningful level of physical activity,” which it later specifies to be one hour of physical activity each day.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that poor nutrition and physical inactivity are the second leading causes of preventable morbidity and mortality, and are among the top priorities of Healthy People 2010 and beyond. Notice there is no mention of obesity or overweight in this statement. Along with this imperative, scholars, health educators and medical experts have begun a push toward a “health at any size” movement that encourages people to switch their focus away from weight loss and toward healthy behaviors that can increase physical and emotional health at any weight – even at weights currently considered medically compromising (2).  

This shift in health objectives toward activity rather than fat is founded upon a huge body of research that shows health and fitness often has very little correlation to body weight or even an individual’s BMI. There’s one impressive meta-analysis of medical studies since the 1970s that concluded overweight and active people may be healthier than those who are thin and sedentary (3). Understanding that activity level – rather than body weight – is a reliable indicator of a person’s health, is a key to dismantling an unhealthy ideology that defines health according to appearance-based measures.

In order for exercise-promoting campaigns to be effective, people need to be able to identify and remove barriers to physical activity in their lives – any excuses, real or imagined, that are holding them back from exercise. One of those barriers is feelings of previous failure at exercising – and this one is especially true for women. Health studies show women tend to associate weight loss with “success,” while many men who gained weight during a study period still considered themselves to have been successful at controlling their weight or managing their health (5). The researchers rightfully warned, “It is possible that women’s perceived lack of success in weight control when no changes in weight ensue may prompt the adoption of aggressive and possibly harmful weight-loss methods, and exacerbate negative body image and weight pre-occupation.” Yep, that’s exactly what happens.

Interestingly – and perhaps not surprisingly to followers of Beauty Redefined – researchers have identified body dissatisfaction as one of the major barriers to regular exercise for women. One study found that one of the most significant barriers to exercise for obese people was their body image perception, with “feeling too fat to exercise” showing up as one of the most common stumbling blocks, particularly for females (6). Recent studies have found that body size satisfaction had a significant effect on whether a person performed regular physical activity, regardless of the individual’s actual weight (7). That is, those who were satisfied with their body – regardless of their size – were more likely to engage in physical activity regularly than those who were less satisfied.

This is scary, considering studies show women tend to overestimate their body weight and size, while men tend to underestimate their body weight and size (8). In one telling example, researchers found that 61 percent of normal weight women perceived themselves as overweight, while 92 percent of underweight women perceived themselves to be average or overweight. As media images of women’s bodies across advertising and entertainment of all genres have shrunk to extremely thin proportions over the past several decades, women’s perceptions of their own bodies has become just as distorted.

In a country where more than 50 percent of women say their bodies “disgust” them and a whopping 90 percent of women are dissatisfied with their appearances (9), body shame needs to be viewed as a huge barrier to health and physical activity for women, and one that must be addressed in meaningful ways – NOW. This rampant self-loathing, which can be partially attributed to women’s self-comparisons to unrealistic and unattainable body ideals in mass media, may very well encourage women to give up on achieving healthy body weights altogether due to the perception that “healthy” or “average” is unreachable. Studies help to confirm this idea.

A 5-year study on a group of teen girls (10) found that girls who were more comfortable with their bodies — regardless of their weight or size — were actually healthier over time. They were more likely to be physically active and pay more attention to what they ate. Meanwhile, the girls who were the most dissatisfied with their size tended to become more sedentary over time and paid less attention to maintaining a healthy diet. This makes sense. When you are ashamed of your body, how likely are you to go to the gym or go outside and be active? How much more likely are you to shut yourself inside with the TV and food that will do you no good?

This truth is why Beauty Redefined exists and why people are eager to get behind our messages: promoting positive body image is crucial to promoting health. Increasing positive feelings about our bodies and being able to see them as more than objects to be measured, judged and looked at are key to helping people make healthy choices – especially increasing their physical activity. You are capable of much more than being looked at. This is the year to end body shame and get on to bigger and better things – especially real health and happiness.

From lost self-esteem, lost money and time spent fixing “flaws” and a well-documented preoccupation with thinness, the effects of profit-driven health information involve serious loss for women, while too many industries see huge economic gains.  From the life insurance industry collecting higher premiums for those they deem “overweight” based on a standard they set themselves, to major financial savings for medical experts and the government using the profit-driven BMI, to the diet and weight loss industry raking in more than $61 billion on Americans’ quest for thinness in 2011, those who make money off the discourse surrounding women’s health are thriving unlike ever before.

There is so much at stake in turning this health crisis around. With so many power holders with serious capitalist interests at stake in maintaining the force of beauty ideology in women’s beliefs about their bodies, it is unlikely that media distorting women’s health will change anytime soon.

But we can change.

Dismantling and revealing harmful ideas about health must become the responsibility of everyone who recognizes their existence: health educators and practitioners who know the difference between thin ideals and indicators of physical fitness; parents, teachers, friends and other influential individuals who see signs of low self-esteem, distorted body perceptions and disordered eating in girls; media consumers who recognize negative feelings about their own or others’ bodies after reading or viewing media that represents ideals as normal or “healthy;” media decision makers who can disrupt the steady stream of idealized bodies with positive representations of more normative shapes and sizes; and activists who are willing to visibly resist messages that repackage women’s health in power-laden terms in any way possible, whether through volunteering to speak out against harmful ideals for any audience who will listen, or by attracting attention toward the dangerous link between beauty ideals, low self-esteem and serious health consequences.

• By pointing out the difference between media representations of women’s bodies and real-life women’s bodies while watching TV or flipping through a magazine with friends or family
• By gaining better understanding of realistic and healthy standards of body weight and physical fitness for ourselves and others over whom we have influence (Reading Part 1 of this “Redefining Health” series is a great start)
• By posting links or starting discussions on blogs and social networking sites to continuously spark conversation about the dangers thin ideals and those who profit from our allegiance to them (join us on Facebook for regular ways to do this!)
• By reminding ourselves and encouraging others to engage in physical activity as a means for improving physical and mental health, rather than a strategy for achieving unattainable beauty ideals, among other practical options
• By using any of our tried-and-tested strategies to take back female beauty and health for girls and women or for boys and men.

Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media.

References

Trigger warning for readers struggling with overexercise or orthorexia. Please be mindful and cautious about how the discussion below may affect you.

From unfortunate fat-shaming in Georgia’s “Strong4Life” campaign put on by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to kids being graded on their weight in public schools across the country via their BMI score on their report cards, we see well-meaning people using harmful and ineffective strategies like crazy to try and counteract this country’s health problems. This overwhelming focus on body size has stolen the spotlight in mass media and scholarly research since the mid-‘90s, all citing an imperative to end an “obesity crisis” that has been championed by the federal health agencies.

With the health and fitness of the nation as the key justification for calling high levels of obesity a “crisis,” it is important to understand how bodily health is defined in research. How is health measured? What defines a healthy or physically fit body? In a country where both obesity and eating disorders have skyrocketed simultaneously, it is crucial to understand how physical health has been and is being understood, tested and promoted.

Scholars are concerned that very little evidence has been produced regarding the question of exactly how body fat is supposed to cause disease (1). With the exception of osteoarthritis, where increased body mass contributes to wear on joints, and a few cancers where estrogen originating in adipose tissue may contribute, causal links between body fat and disease remain hypothetical. Researchers are asking health professionals and policy makers to consider whether it makes sense to treat body weight as a barometer of public health. Despite this shaky foundation for defining physical health in terms of body fatness, much of current health and communication research measures health through simple measures of a person’s body fat, and that may be doing more harm than good for the health status of this country.

Defining Health: Body Fat = Body Health?

Researchers measuring health in terms of body fat generally rely on the American Council on Exercise’s guidelines to determine which percentages are healthy, with anything below 10% and above 31% in women (or below 2% and above 24% in men) considered a health risk. Direct measures of body composition estimate a person’s total body fat mass and fat-free or lean mass through MRI, underwater weighing, CAT scan, and other methods. Power, Lake & Cole (1997) said, “an ideal measure of body fat should be accurate in its estimation of body fat; precise, with small measurement error; accessible, in terms of simplicity, cost and ease of use; acceptable to the subject; and well-documented, with published reference values.” They go on to state that “no existing measure satisfies all these criteria.” Since these methods are expensive and invasive, they are rarely used in research. Because of this, scholars are much more likely to rely on indirect measures of body composition, including the most popular of them all: Body Mass Index (BMI).

Indirect techniques for measuring fat include all the most common ones: waist and hip measurements, skinfold thickness, and indexes of measured height and weight such as BMI. These measurements are only a surrogate measure of body fatness, yet they are commonly used to represent not only adiposity but also health and fitness in research and media discussion about healthy bodies. The life and health insurance industry, medical practitioners, researchers, health specialists and seemingly everyone else on the planet uses the BMI to measure people’s health. That’s because it is the international standard for judging healthy weight, as upheld and promoted by the CDC, NIH and WHO. This is bad.

Here are 10 quick reasons why the BMI is a shockingly terrible measure of health:

The equation used to calculate BMI (the ratio of an individual’s weight to height squared) was developed in the 19th century by Quetelet, a French scientist who warned the calculation was only meant to be used for large diagnostic studies on general populations and was not accurate for individuals.

The BMI’s height and weight tables used to tell you what your score means came from the life insurance industry. Yep. A standardized table of average weights and heights was developed first in 1908, when life insurance companies began looking for ways to charge higher premiums to applicants based on screening by their own medical examiners. By setting the thresholds for “ideal weight” and “overweight” lower than what mortality data showed as the actual healthy weight ranges, they were able to collect more money for those they deemed “overweight.” In 1985, the NIH began defining obesity according to BMI, which defined the 85th percentile for each sex as the official cutoff for what constitutes “obese,” based on the standards for underweight, average, overweight and obese that were set by the 1983 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company mortality tables (Williamson, 1993).

The NIH implemented the BMI standard under the theory that it would simply be used by doctors to warn patients who were at especially high risk for obesity-related problems (2). It was never meant for individuals to calculate their BMI and accept it as a diagnosis of whether or not their weight is healthy, yet that is EXACTLY how it is used today. Individuals are encouraged to easily diagnose their own BMI status through the NIH website-hosted BMI calculator.

Those weight tables are based on the unfounded idea that any weight gain after age 25 is unhealthy. Though weight tables before the mid-1900s allowed for increasing weight with age (which naturally occurs), the Metropolitan Life insurance Company became the first to deem an increase in weight after age 25 as undesirable and unhealthy – again, to collect higher premiums. Also, the BMI is advised to be used only for people older than 20, due to the changes young bodies undergo before that age, yet it is very often used to diagnose adolescents and teens. Researchers admit that it is unclear at what level of body fat health risks begin to rise for children (Denney-Wilson et al., 2003), so trying to define a standard of what constitutes overweight and obese for children is incredibly difficult.

Those weight tables also did not take into account body frame or build, unlike previous tables, which included “small,” “medium” or “large frame” due to demands from physicians who rightfully wanted to avoid serious miscalculations of body fat (Cziernawski, 2007).

Those same 1983 tables (and now our BMI) also failed to take gender into account, despite healthy levels of fat and weight distribution differing greatly between males and females (3).

BMI is based on a Caucasian standard. It is proven to be highly inaccurate for other races and ethnicities. In particular, in some Asian populations, a specific BMI reflects a higher percentage of body fat than in white or European Ppulations (James, 2002). Some Pacific populations and African Americans in general also have a lower percentage of body fat at a given BMI than do white or European populations (Stevens, 2002). Even the WHO has acknowledged the extensive evidence that “the associations between BMI, percentage of body fat, and body fat distribution differ across populations” (WHO, 2004).

In 1998, millions of people considered of “normal” weight were suddenly re-classified as “overweight” the next day when the NIH lowered the threshold for “overweight” and “obese” by 10 lbs. They based this change on the vague claim that studies linking extra weight to health problems warranted the changes (Cohen & McDermott, 1998). On June 16, 1998, the “average” woman was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 155 pounds. On June 17, a woman of that same height and weight became “overweight.” The requirement for “average” dropped 10 pounds to 145, and a person of the same height who weighed 175 pounds was considered “obese.”

9. Experts say it’s “useless.” Dr. David Haslam, the clinical director of Britain’s National Obesity Forum, said, “It is now widely accepted that the BMI is useless for assessing the healthy weight of individuals” (4). Despite extensive evidence proving the BMI lacks accuracy for calculating an individual’s body fat (4), A growing pool of evidence suggests that BMI is a “crude tool” for judging individual health that “fans fears of an obesity epidemic even as it fails as a reliable measure of an individual’s health” (Heimpel, 2009). Even the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force concluded there is insufficient evidence to suggest BMI screening can be used to prevent adverse health outcomes (4). Prentice & Jebb (2001) illustrated a wide range of conditions in which “surrogate anthropometric measures, especially BMI, provide misleading information about body fat content, including infancy and childhood, aging, racial differences, athletes, military and civil forces personnel, weight loss with and without exercise, physical training and special clinical circumstances.” More and more studies are showing the fact that people in the “overweight” and even “obese” categories of the BMI are at much lower risk of death than those in the “underweight” and even “normal” categories. So why do we keep measuring health based on BMI?

Despite all the evidence against it, government health agencies defend the BMI as the national standard for judging healthy weight due to the fact that it is “inexpensive and easy for clinicians and for the general public” (CDC, 2010). That’s exactly why researchers use it so consistently as a stand-in for “health.”

It is imperative to keep in mind that the much-publicized U.S. obesity crisis has risen to the forefront of national attention only since the late ‘90s, after the NIH changed the standard for what constitutes overweight and obesity. Using data gathered from 1976-1980 and comparing it to data from 1999-2002, the CDC reported that obesity doubled from 15 to 31 percent between 1980 and 2002 (CDC, 2007). It is unclear whether the data was compared using the same standard for determining “obesity,” since the criteria for fitting into this category changed in 1998 to include many more people that were previously considered merely “overweight.” Though obesity remains at the forefront of national health concerns and media discourse of Americans’ health, the rate of obesity hasn’t changed in a decade. It plateaued since the most recent CDC report, with no change between 2003 and 2006, when the most recent national data was gathered (Heimpel, 2009; CDC, 2007).

Unfortunately, heart disease, cancers and diabetes remain serious threats to public health, and weight is considered a risk factor for these chronic illnesses. So if the BMI is worthless, then what do we use to measure or determine bodily health? The No. 1 step is to quit measuring and start moving. That brings us to the incredibly important Part 2 of this Healthy Redefined series.

The next step is to redefine what this crisis is really about. It’s about health, not body size. During the time the obesity crisis has been in the forefront of media and federal health agency initiatives, the diet and weight loss industries have thrived unlike ever before. Simultaneously, fat-shaming/thin-ideal-promoting media have also flourished, with female body image hitting an all-time low. With lost self-esteem, lost money and time spent fixing “flaws” and a well-documented preoccupation with thinness among females of all ages, the effects of profit-driven health information involve serious loss for women, while too many industries see huge economic gains. From the life insurance industry collecting higher premiums from those they deem “overweight” based on a standard they set themselves, to major financial savings for medical experts and the government using the profit-driven BMI, to the diet and weight loss industry raking in more than $61 billion on Americans’ quest for thinness in 2011, those who make money off the discourse surrounding women’s health are thriving unlike ever before.

With so much evidence showing that our obsession with body fat is missing the mark for health and well-being of all sorts, I argue that we need to do away with the title “obesity crisis” all together. This crisis isn’t about too many people meeting an arbitrary standard of body fat, this crisis is about poor health, which is often exacerbated by inactivity and poor diet. People can take their own physical power back by measuring their physical health according to how they feel and what their bodies can do, rather than simply measuring their weight or size.  But FIRST, we must focus on getting rid of barriers like “feeling too fat to exercise” and not knowing if you can be successful in order to make way for real success! Next Up — Healthy Redefined Part 2: Forget Fat and Get Fit!

Need more help developing body image resilience that can help you overcome your self-consciousness and be more powerful than ever before? Learn how to recognize harmful ideals, redefine beauty and health, and resist what holds you back from happiness, health, and real empowerment with the Beauty Redefined Body Image Program for girls and women 14+. It is an online, anonymous therapeutic tool that can change your life, designed by Lexie & Lindsay Kite, with PhDs in body image and media.

Kite, Lindsay. (2011). Redefining Health Part 1: Measuring the Obesity Crisis. The Beauty Redefined Foundation: www.beautyredefined.net/redefining-health-part-1