Friday Rant - And my celebrity BMI is...

In this That's Fit post, there's a link to a site which lets you type in your height, weight, and gender and it will provide your BMI (body mass index, the percentage of body that is fat). The fun spin is that it will tell you what celebrity has the same BMI as you.

You remember those handy dandy charts on your doctor's walls, the ones where you look at your height and cross it with your weight and it tells you whether you're normal, overweight, or obese? That's BMI. And I have a major problem with the system.

Here's the thing...some people are clear cut. Obviously obese, obviously underweight, that kind of thing. But what this doesn't take into account is dimensions and how fit someone is. Because someone who's 5'5", 160lbs and very fit is going to come out with the same BMI as someone who is 5'5", 160lbs and hasn't exercised a day in their life. But obviously their fitness and health is going to be very different (for the means of this random example, assume their diet is the same), and they're going to carry that weight differently too. Plus, all that muscle is heavier than fat (true, though lots of people use it as an excuse for gaining weight).

So, for example, I type in my vital stats into the celebrity BMI calculator. Who do I come out with? Queen Latifah. Now, don't get me wrong, she's got a great hourglass figure. But I also think that she's considerably heftier than I am. Part of the problem is that she's also 6 inches taller than me, so to have the same BMI, she'd have to be a lot heavier, proportionally. So to be more accurate, they shouldn't just pick a celebrity with the same BMI, but one who's at least a bit more the same height (6 inches? Come on!).

The alternative gaining ground is the waist-hip ratio. Basically, divide your waist circumference by your hip circumference, with the ideal ratio for women being below .80. I like this one much better, because it does take fitness into account (if you exercise and eat appropriately, you're more likely to have a lower ratio). And of course, some people (the classic "apple," a term which I hate) will have more of a risk because they hold more weight around the middle (this has been shown with several studies to increase the risk of diseases and early death, unlike the "pear" which doesn't seem to increase risk).

The most effective way to determine BMI is DEXA, which is expensively done at a radiologist, or water displacement, which requires total immersion in a pool. So neither are all that realistic for the basic population. Calipers are also effective, if done properly. And that's the caveat, because it's really easy to do improperly. Given the impracticality of the former two, and the ease of tester error on the latter, waist-hip ratio is one of the easiest methods we can use to determine our own BMI (there's also the electrical impulse machine, but really it's not the most effective, plus it requires equipment).

I understand that we're trying to be all healthy, and that's important. But I think that we've found these easy way to slide people into categories, without really looking at the specifics or how people are different.

Friday Rant - Calorie what what??!

We have so many yummy foods available to us nowadays. If you think back 100 or even 50 years ago, the American diet was much less varied, and people ate the food that they cooked (or their family cooked), for the most part. People did eat out, but it wasn't quite as prevalent as it is now. This is in part because women are more often than not working just as much as their husbands and the percentage of stay-at-home parents has considerably reduced. And who wants to work all day long, then maybe hit the gym afterwards, then come home and cook a full dinner for the family? Not likely. I don't even like to cook in evenings when I get home, and I live alone.

So what do we do? We have aisles of frozen prepared foods at the grocery store, take-out and dining out. While I don't care for frozen dinners, I do love take out and eating out. The problem is that you never really know what's in the food. Read this article about some of the various chains (for instance, Dunkin' Donuts smoothies pack a major sugar punch and IHOP's omelet feast will cost you 1335 calories ) - in NY they're forcing them to provide the nutritional information on their menus, and it turns out that some of their meals (just an entree, not including drinks, appetizers, and dessert) come to more than half (if not almost all) an average person's daily calories! They're getting a bit better about not adding trans fats to their food (I recently read that because of the regulations, a chain fast food restaurants might actually be a safer bet, concerning trans fat, than would a chain sit-down restaurant). But we really don't know what all they used to cook the food (olive oil vs butter vs partially hydrogenated vegetable oil plus sodium galore).

And the problem is that they restaurants want people to come back and eat there again (imagine that?!), and well, gosh darnit, fat tastes good! So they make it unhealthy because they know if people eat it and like it, they'll come back. But if they make it really healthy, it might still taste good (healthy food can taste good, really it can), it just doesn't have that same pop of "wow!" that the fatty stuff has. Unless it's really fresh yummy stuff like raspberries off the bush from the farmer's market, then it's expensive. So while we all complain that restaurants are hiding mega-doses of calories in our meals, we're basically encouraging them to do just that.

If I ate out or got take out every night, I think that I'd have tons of trouble keeping my weight to a healthy level. That's just me, and perhaps it's because when I do happen to eat out, I'm not shy about eating a lot. Since I don't eat out often, I figure when I do, it's a treat. So maybe if I ate out more often, I'd be more circumspect in what I chose to eat.

So here I am, ranting that the restaurants pack their meals with calories and trans fats, admitting that I eat plenty of it when I do go out, and pointing out that it's very difficult to provide home cooked food (unless you eat home cooked food from the freezer, like I do) with how much we have to work just to put that very food on the table. So this is a true rant - I'm complaining about it, but not really providing solutions. Maybe all my smart readers can help me out with this?