Thursday, September 09, 2010

sifting through the bmi bullshit

I'm trying to follow the trail. It looks like it all starts with this article: Body Mass Index (BMI) Badly Flawed. It basically goes over why BMI = bullshit (something I learned a long time ago and was confirmed by one of my marathon coaches). This article then inspired this slideshow. This slideshow was mentioned in this post. This post referenced this article about Steven N. Blair, a health expert who is also considered fat (or a fathlete depending on how you frame it). Said post also refers to this article called Weight Index Doesn’t Tell the Whole Truth. Simply put, it reiterates the original article. (Sorry this is so confusing.) All those articles leads to this commentary: Fat and Health. My spider senses tell me that this is probably the passage that has gotten most people's feathers ruffled (Note: I do recommend you read the ENTIRE article and not just this excerpt):
Can you judge health with a naked eye? It’s true, you can’t. But let’s be honest, there’s not an epidemic of fat runners out there. Those people are outliers, and not everyone is an outlier. I’m with people who argue that we shouldn’t focus solely on weight in public health debates, and that we should be talking about eating better and exercising as a way to promote health without reinforcing, intentionally or not, the notion that some body types are better than others. But, by and large, (pardon the expression) weightier people suffer health problems that are well documented. It’s not that thin people are necessarily fit. It’s that America as a whole is unhealthy, and one of the ways we can document our decades-long decrease in activity is by documenting our expanding waistlines.
This now leads us to this last article: Fat and Health, A Response Again, I recommend that you read the whole article because it provides a thorough understanding about equating health and fat, body policing, fat hatred, "health" fallacies, etc. I could try to summarize the article, but that would mean I'm giving you permission to be lazy. Just feed your mind and read it.

There you have it. I hope you enjoyed sifting through the BMI bullshit.

Today's Small Victories
I've been sugar detoxing since Tuesday. I broke last night. But I'm back on track today. Yea.

Warm-up
Run 800 meters

CrossFit One World WOD
Strength:
Weighted Step-ups 4x8 (four sets of four steps on each leg) 75#

Conditioning:
Perform 150 push-ups (on knees) for time. You can rest in the plank position, but a break anywhere else within the movement constitutes a 150m row before you continue the push-ups

Joanne's Final Time - 22:30

Notes (to myself) about this workout: 150 push-ups?! I may have lost count, so it's give or take about 10 push-ups. To cope, I did this in sets of 10 with rowing in between. I feel fine right now. However, something tells me my upper body is going to ache tomorrow morning. Gah!

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