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Fat Acceptance Movement
Replies
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mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
It isn't arbitrary. It's very specific. It's just that it's a terrible metric for this purpose.
But accepting this being a terrible measurement, the argument is still sound, and that is that generally people at an obese BMI will be generally unhealthier than they would be if they were at a normal BMI all else being equal. (And this generalized fact doesn't care how you or anyone else feels about it.)4 -
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Yeah BMI is pretty much useless. I'm at the lower end of over weight according to BMI and I am 6'0", 33 inch waist, and washboard abs.3
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People come in different sizes... no one makes anyone "feel". feelings are the choice and prerogative of the individual...and we typically reach for the feeling that best supports our preconceived notion of what WE think serves us best. MOST adults (North American) have access to educational material which helps identify appropriate food choices... activity level is also a choice... and we are all in part products of our environment and genetic predisposition. and as human beings fallible... and imperfect... THAT a few individuals feel empowered by standing up and saying " I am Fat and proud of it..." does not diminish the health risks associated with carrying extra weight... I defy anyone that is "proud to be fat" to stand beside chunks of fat equivalent to what they are presumed to be carrying as "extra" and not be motivated to make changes in their lifestyle. I look at people...as a hobby... and some people..."look" like that's the way they were born to look at a heavier weight than what would be considered a "healthy" weight" some people are wider... some are taller... some have long lithe bones.. some have stout strong bones... some people were meant for heavy hard work...others for less physically demanding pursuits... a rugby team is the epitome of the dichotomy of the physical purpose of an individuals personal evolution.
some people are fat... so what... some people are skinny... so what...some people are loud some are quiet.. some are fragile while others can suffer the slings and arrows and pretend to speak for those they think they have a right to represent... in the end...and we all face the end... it isn't what we looked like... or how we ate... it will be how we treated others that will matter... because those feelings we CHOOSE to feel... will all we take with us when we have breathed our last2 -
ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run so we could get our proverbial houses in order, if necessary. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.10 -
PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.2 -
PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.11 -
jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »MichelleP31 wrote: »Here is my point by point response to this article.
1. You've obviously never been fat. You are ridiculed in school. You are ridiculed by your family. Main stream media makes fat jokes on a regular basis. People snicker at you when you walk by. YouTube. Is. Brutal. Narcissitic people write flippant articles about FAM while readily admitting that they are not an expert but how "America accepts fat people."
2. Says who? Have I told you what your "body positivity" should include? Who do you think you are to tell me what MY image of MYself should include?
3. That's probably true. But at the end of each of our lives we will all die of something. Who are you to tell me what *I* should die from? So somehow, if I die of a cancer that's better than obesity caused Type 2 diabetes? Car wreck better than heart attack? Who died and made you god, so that you can decide that others need to get sick and die of whatever it is that you find acceptable. I don't recall asking for your permission to be overweight or to die.
4.Since when does accepting myself mean that I expect everyone to be attracted to me? And why did you decide to turn this article into something about yourself and people not finding you attractive? You seem quite narcissistic. I'm not attracted to everyone and I would never expect anyone else to be attracted to me. I'm not "owed" people being attracted to me.
5. Absolutely it is. And? For the record, there are many, many, many people who are not overweight due to overeating at all. Perhaps you'd like to write an article on how they are not allowed to accept themselves as overweight due to thyroid issues, PCOS, hormonal imbalances, medicines, insulin resistance, cancer,etc, etc. Oh wait, you already did.
6. FINALLY! I'm so glad I have permission to look down YOUR skinny little nose and judge all of those horrible parents who DARE to have overweight children. Thank goodness Carolyn Hall spoke up and gave us all permission to judge that mama giving her chunky toddler that donut to keep her quiet in the store while she tries to hurriedly shop because she has a sick parent she's got to get home too. Or that dad who doesn't have a CLUE what to do with the 4 year old who won't eat ANYTHING but chicken nuggets and french fries. WHAT???? He doesn't know what to do????? Clearly he forgot to read that manual that said, "What to do When Your Fat Child Will Not Eat Anything But _______"
Finally, the almighty Carolyn Wall has spoken. Thank you. I'll crawl back into my fat little hole now so that you can feel awesome about your skinny little self.
When we were kids our mom would give us grapes or carrots in the store to keep us occupied. At dinner time she didn't drive us to McDonald's and then ask us what we wanted besides chicken nuggets and french fries, she simply said "it's time for dinner" and we ate whatever was being served. She didn't read that non-existant manual either, yet she managed. I did the same with my son and lots of other people do the same with their kids too all while dealing with life's problems in between.
People have a right to voice a negative opinion about a lifestyle which has created an epidemic in our society which we all pay for. People also have a right to voice a negative opinion about parents who destroy their children's health for the sake of convenience. If those opinions hit too close to home, that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
Cake...cookies...
STAHP ALREADY!!!
(I assume you've already made a pie reference in one of the posts I haven't read yet.)
My favorite was the "elephant in the room". I was gonna try to work "easy as pie" in there but didn't get the chance
1 -
PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.0 -
sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.4 -
sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.
And the creators of Viagra originally said it was only to treat HBP and angina.7 -
jofjltncb6 wrote: »sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.
And the creators of Viagra originally said it was only to treat HBP and angina.
Except its use for ED was found to be appropriate whereas using BMI for health insurance will punish individuals for building lean muscle mass.2 -
sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
I would be an example. I had to drop 5lbs fast for my life insurence to be a lower bracket. I cut out all lifting and ran daily for a week and cut down to 1200 calories a day so I would hit "healthy" BMI even with a 27% body fat. My goals to drop more body fat but I am no where near as unhealthy as someone with a 35% body fat at the top of there "heatlhy" BMI is when it comes to risks to my health.1 -
jofjltncb6 wrote: »sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.
And the creators of Viagra originally said it was only to treat HBP and angina.
I assume you have a point other than to demonstrate a very poor understanding of logic.-1 -
jofjltncb6 wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
It isn't arbitrary. It's very specific. It's just that it's a terrible metric for this purpose.
But accepting this being a terrible measurement, the argument is still sound, and that is that generally people at an obese BMI will be generally unhealthier than they would be if they were at a normal BMI all else being equal. (And this generalized fact doesn't care how you or anyone else feels about it.)
Agreed.
Of all the different possible equations one could have chosen to define obesity of a population based on variance of height it could be argued that the use of this formula is arbitrary versus another formula. In fact, it isn't that arbitrary - the formula has been statically studied, reviewed, criticised and even when found wanting, someone classified as obese or morbidly obese with this formula is highly unlikely to be found in the normal weight range by another method of evaluation. Sure, it might be off on the borderline cases or from one class to another for a few individuals but not for the majority of people.6 -
coreyreichle wrote: »coreyreichle wrote: »
Different perspectives. The act of doing is what I focus on. Many might have quit, but she found something she enjoys doing and the fact that she comes in last doesn't stop her from going out the door and doing. I find inspiration in that.
I guess. I idolize people who work to improve themselves, and not just people who over years, just "aim to finish"... I'm glad she enjoys doing what she does, my point is she's not a particularly good example to use as someone to aim for. She's mediocre at best, and in reality, she's a sub-par performer for her age, consistently placing nearly dead last (Even by age group) in every event she's been in.
So all the people who "finish" the Boston Marathon but don't place officially are mediocre?
One of the victims from the 2013 marathon bombing lost a leg. She ran this year. I heard she didn't finish until around 7pm. May have been last or almost last. Is she mediocre?
I don't know who the fat girl runner is. I admire her that she has the courage to call herself that. I admire her that she runs.
I only walk. Don't want to know what you think of me.
I walk. And I look to continuously improve my duration and # of hills (as measured by Floors on my fitbit.) In the last year, I've more than tripled my duration.
I'd look at time as well, but do trail maintenance while I'm out there, which is hard if not impossible to factor in to time.2 -
jofjltncb6 wrote: »sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.
And the creators of Viagra originally said it was only to treat HBP and angina.
I assume you have a point other than to demonstrate a very poor understanding of logic.
Classy Rob. (And yet still obtuse)0 -
ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health0 -
Did you think his comment was classy?ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »sunnybeaches105 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »PiperGirl08 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »mskessler89 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »jofjltncb6 wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »ArmyofAdrian wrote: »I don't know what definition of obesity you are using, but we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the CDC's definition of obesity: "Weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height is described as overweight or obese. " A weight that is higher than what is healthy would be unhealthy.
Also, the AMA, The World Health Organization, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists each recognize obesity as a disease. A disease is included in the set of things that are unhealthy.
Of course, the line between healthy and unhealthy is uniform for a height regardless of any other factors? That seems very, very arbitrary to me. The BMI definition of obesity is population-statistical. It's uninformative for any individual.
How can it be arbitrary when it's based on statistical analysis? Anyway, quibbling over the diagnostic criteria doesn't change the plain fact that obesity is unhealthy.
For several reasons. One, BMI does not include sufficient variables to adequately be more than an estimation for an individual. Two, BMI does not adequately cover sufficient populations to really develop an all-inclusive model with the variables it does include (i.e. the model doesn't fit well for Asians as an example). It also does not fit the very short or the very tall. Three, how exactly were cut-offs picked? They have some basis in risk analysis, but what level of risk is considered unacceptable is basically arbitrary.
Basing a criterion on its statistical significance using huge data sets is not at all "arbitrary".
Deciding that a 20.1% risk* is unacceptable whereas a 20% risk* is acceptable is arbitrary. There is no standard for when health risk crosses from 'acceptable' to not.
Also, when dealing with global population and physiological diversity, I'd hardly consider the sampling used to generate the BMI model as 'huge'.
*Not actual numbers, used only as an example.
You arbitrarily pull numbers out of the air then pretend those arbitrary numbers somehow refute the actual statistical analysis??
Totally missed the point, didn't you?
Okay Rob, I'll ignore the AMA, CDC, NIH, and WHO since they didn't clear their statistical methods with you first and because they can't guarantee absolute 100% predictably of outcomes based on risk factors.
Which of these organizations compell you to hold overweight people in contempt?
I need direct quotes on this one.
The funny thing is I don't disagree that obesity increases health risks. But that isn't really what's being debated here.
it is though, isn't it? I mean, no one here is arguing that obese people should be shamed, held in contempt, mocked, etc. The argument is about the inherent increased risks of obesity (and in my opinion, is best contrasted with the same person if they were not obese).
Read all the posts for the person towards which my response was directed.
If the argument was about the inherent risks of obesity the argument would be over.
There are plenty of people on this thread downplaying or outright denying that obesity is unhealthy. Heck that's the entire point of "fat acceptance" and "healthy at any size"; they're trying to sugar coat the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
I don't believe so. The argument you were responding to was that a cutoff of 25 BMI (or some such) as the line between "healthy" and not is rather arbitrary on an individual basis.
I tend to think that most of the disagreement in this thread is due to people reading things into terms that others don't mean by them. Almost unanimously people have said that denying that obesity is unhealthy is a mistake, and denying that weight loss is a positive goal when one is obese is a bad thing -- those corners of HAES and fat acceptance that say otherwise haven't gotten any support that I've seen.
I don't see the "entire point" of fat acceptance or HAES as saying obesity is not unhealthy. As I (and others) stated above, accepting ourselves while still fat (working on the self-hatred issues) helped us take control and lose weight. And I see a positive element of HAES that even while you are fat you can improve healthfulness by getting out there and getting active. And again, for me, focusing on what I was doing as about "getting fit and being as healthy as I could" was less scary than the idea of trying to lose weight and failing, as I knew I could control what I ate and my exercise choices. And, of course, I also lost weight -- typically focusing on getting fit and healthy will result in weight loss.
Please look up the word "arbitrary", then look at the statistical analysis behind the diagnostic criteria used to diagnose obesity. The criteria is anything but "arbitrary". The fact that it cannot single-handedly predict outcomes with absolute certainty does not make it "arbitrary".
These attempts to "spin" obesity guidelines as arbitrary is another example of the denial you claim isn't happening.
If people truly acknowledge that obesity is unhealthy then accepting their own obesity seems bizarre. If they are trying to lose weight, then they can't accurately say they've accepted being fat. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
For individuals, BMI is arbitrary. BMI is used to assess populations on a large scale. You can't use BMI to determine if an individual is healthy, or even if an individual is overfat.
I have always been a "normal" BMI, but at my highest weight, I had a high enough body fat % to be considered obese. According to your argument, I was healthy. Reality is that, had I not lost weight, I would have stayed at higher risk for obesity-related health problems. On the flip side, there's tall or muscular people who get classified as overweight because BMI goes off height and weight alone, not accounting for fat %. Fat % is a much more accurate way of establishing risk in individuals, but according to your BMI-is-not-arbitrary stance, these lean-but-heavy individuals are unhealthy.
ETA: Definition of arbitrary
MATHEMATICS
(of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
The reason people keep calling BMI arbitrary is that while, yes, BMI has specified values, not everyone who falls into those categories actually ARE what the value specifies. A person with a BMI of 25 will not, by other quantifiable standards such as body fat %, be overweight (overfat and therefore unhealthy) every single time.
Spin spin spin.
I could have lived in denial about the status of my health by saying I was at a healthy BMI and therefore healthy. Or I could use a tool more applicable for individuals instead of mass population, realize my body fat % was too high, and fix it. Yep, all spin there.
BMI is not the best tool for assessing risk on an individual scale. That does not mean obesity is a good state for people to be in, or that anyone here is encouraging people to be obese. That does not mean that the morbidly obese people trying to throw BMI out the window by claiming they're "big-boned" are in any way justified. It just means BMI is not always going to be an accurate indicator of a person's health or body composition. And there are probably a lot more people out there thinking they're healthy when they're actually at risk, especially if that's compounded with other lifestyle risk factors.
BMI guidelines are just that: Guidelines. No one anywhere claimed BMI guidelines are the sole tool necessary to make a determination about overall health. That's a straw-man argument. None of this makes BMI guidelines "arbitrary".
No, but many insurance companies in the US are talking about using BMI as a way to regulate how much your premiums are (if you're overweight or obese, you'll have higher premiums because you are associated with a higher burden of cost for health care expenses). As can be expected, a lot of people have problems with that.
My insurance company warned us that in a year we'd be screened for 5 metrics. And then at 6 months allowed us to take a test run. And then at that one year mark, screened everyone. Those who failed on two or more metrics paid higher premiums. As I recall, the metrics included smoking, waist size, blood pressure, and two others that elude me.
The point being that insurance should be for the unexpected, i.e. those things outside our control. We, the consumer, the insured, should be responsible for those things within our control. And if we're not willing to be, then we ought to pay some price, i.e. have some skin in the game, instead of wantonly pawning off our foreseeable costs on someone else.
Um, fine?
But BMI is not accurate FOR SOME. In general, most people fall under the bell curve for which it is applicable, but when you make it a hard and fast rule for defining coverage, then it does become a problem for those few outliers.
BMI is in fact pretty generous. Most Americans are not Greeks God and Goddesses or Olympic class athletes and it is *not* muscle mass that drives them towards the higher ends of the scale.
Where there are real exceptions, provisions are in place to accommodate them. This is a false argument.
Knowledge of BMI is not enough to be making judgments about a specific individual. It's a very simplistic calculation and while its fine to use for a population because one can assume a normalized distribution, it shouldn't be used for insurance calculations. I've already had one friend who was forced to lose 20 pounds of muscle mass so he could save money on his life insurance premiums. I'm not looking forward to the possiblity of being rated myself for health insurance.
The creator of the concept of BMI said that it was ONLY useful to measure population trends and was NOT an acceptable measure to diagnose individuals.
And the creators of Viagra originally said it was only to treat HBP and angina.
I assume you have a point other than to demonstrate a very poor understanding of logic.
Classy Rob. (And yet still obtuse)
The Viagra analogy had no relevance. Is that obtuse? I don't think so.
BMI is not diagnostic on an individual level. It is a measurement used at the population level.
1 -
coreyreichle wrote: »DrifterBear wrote: »People shouldn't be shamed, and weight alone isn't the only factor in determining healthiness. But at the end of the day, how different is over eating from over drinking or smoking? I have similar reactions to seeing someone who is grossly overweight, underweight, drunk, or smoking. It creates health issues that are up to that person to live with, but they also can create medical costs that society must absorb. I'm all for people not feeling ashamed for anything, but as a society, I think it's misguided to downplay health issues that result from being overweight. The core message of those movements is good, but it seems easy for people to use it as an excuse to keep getting more unhealthy.
It's no different. Notice we don't have a "Smoker Acceptance Movement" or an "Alcoholics Acceptance Movement" either. We treat them like the disease they are, as we should do for obesity, not create a "Fat acceptance movement".
(Note I'm agreeing with you here, although it might sound as though I'm not)
I see how FA could be on par with a "Smoker Acceptance Movement" or an "Alcoholics Acceptance Movement."
Speaking of shaming, and AA, I've heard lots of shaming language in AA meetings.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-tompkins/alcoholics-anonymous_b_1383849.html0
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