Quote:
Originally Posted by Shmead
There's a difference between socially and medically morbidly obese. Socially, "morbidly obese" is someone who can't walk anymore and has to use a scooter; medically, "morbidly obese" means you are at a weight that will almost certainly cause a person to develop serious, debilitating health problems if left untreated.
Your BMI is medical information, and you should take it seriously--but you already are, if you are here. It says nothing about your appearance, your worth as a person, etc.
I think this is an excellent post, and I totally agree.
Handling your BMI and the associated labels as pieces of medical information is absolutely the way to go. Popular culture has distorted medical terms such that the lay person's meaning of a word is totally different to its medical meaning. I've been medically obese before, but I never felt like I looked like society's idea of an obese person, which is unsurprising, because those two meanings don't map on to each other at all. Similarly, when I think of "morbidly obese", I imagine someone unable to get out of bed, breathing through a ventilator, covered in bed sores, and that's entirely because of the way society inaccurately characterises these terms. I think everyone here can appreciate that the BMI calculators call you "obese" or "morbidly obese" a much lighter weights than you picture someone with those labels being.
As Shmead says, of course, you should take your medical statistics seriously, but I personally feel there's relatively little to be gained from tying them up with your sense of who you are, and your self-esteem.