That Is Fucked Up
Some total ass clown told Joelle that, at 5'10", her goal weight of 160 was still too fat. "Well, missy, I hate to break it to ya, but your ideal weight is more like 135. 160 is pretty meaty."
"Pretty meaty"? "Your ideal weight"? Fuuuuuck that. Sounds like a guy who listens to what Howard Stern has to say about what a woman "should weigh," and unless you're interested in dating Howard Stern--or one of his mouth-breathing listeners who can't think for himself--that assessment is worth exactly nothing.
I feel the desire to punch that guy right in his hypocritical beer belly for making Joelle feel the way he did. But I will take the high road, and merely point out that not only am I five foot ten, but Sarah is too, and she had this extremely apt observation to make:
I get on the scale, and it says 133, and the nurse says, "Good for you!" Dude. At five foot ten? Hell. No. Ma'am. You could have used my wrist as a piercing awl at that point. The asses of all my pairs of pants looked all saggy and empty, because I had maybe half a buttock total, because I didn't eat and burned any extra calories crying myself to sleep at night and running around my apartment with packing tape the rest of the time. My face got all pointy and my sternum got all ridgy and I just looked grey and rough and beaten down -- and the nurse congratulates me. For looking like a box kite with shoes. That is fucked up.
"Pretty meaty"? "Your ideal weight"? Fuuuuuck that. Sounds like a guy who listens to what Howard Stern has to say about what a woman "should weigh," and unless you're interested in dating Howard Stern--or one of his mouth-breathing listeners who can't think for himself--that assessment is worth exactly nothing.
I feel the desire to punch that guy right in his hypocritical beer belly for making Joelle feel the way he did. But I will take the high road, and merely point out that not only am I five foot ten, but Sarah is too, and she had this extremely apt observation to make:
I get on the scale, and it says 133, and the nurse says, "Good for you!" Dude. At five foot ten? Hell. No. Ma'am. You could have used my wrist as a piercing awl at that point. The asses of all my pairs of pants looked all saggy and empty, because I had maybe half a buttock total, because I didn't eat and burned any extra calories crying myself to sleep at night and running around my apartment with packing tape the rest of the time. My face got all pointy and my sternum got all ridgy and I just looked grey and rough and beaten down -- and the nurse congratulates me. For looking like a box kite with shoes. That is fucked up.
posted by mo pie at 12:08 PM
6 Comments:
That's an important point, Beth. And part of the reason the BMI is such crap. Just knowing someone's height and weight aren't enough. Sars might look unhealthy at a weight that would be great for someone else. Muscle makes an enormous difference, so does body type, the traditional "how big are your bones" question, etc. Sars and I may be the same height, but if I was the same weight as she is I am sure we'd look entirely different, because our body types are entirely different. We'd carry our weight in different places, etc.
Two things: 1) People often have a seriously skewed idea of how much they think people weigh, versus how much they actually weigh, leading to comments such as "160 is pretty meaty".
And 2) Body type plays a huge role in your ideal weight.
I'm 5'6" and when I was going to the gym 4 times a week (minimum) doing a combination of weights and cardio, I weighed 160 lbs. The old saw "I'm big boned" definitely has some truth. I have a big giant head, and no one would call my wrists delicate by any means. To get to 135 or *gasp* 115 (which is the low end of my healthy weight range, as decided by the BMI chart) would have required the training schedule of an Olympic athlete and would have left me looking like Lara Flynn Boyle, big head and all.
Long ago, when I apparently was hanging out in the shallow end of the tact pool, I knew a guy who had an absolutely rigid policy of never dating anyone who weighed more than 120 lbs. There was no point in even discussing the subject with him, or pointing out that, should he fall head over heels for a girl who was, say, 5'8 or 5'9, and the perfect beanpole of his dreams, she might actually weigh more than that and still be thin as a rail; he didn't want to hear it. Some people are just fixated on a number, to the utter exclusion of logic and reason.
By the way, I hope that it is alright if I post comments here -- I am fascinated with media and body image issues, and I really empathize with the difficulties in finding that delicate balance between being health-conscience, and unhealthily obsessed with an unrealistic ideal of cadaverous beauty.
I'm not technically overweight, but when I catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, I can't help but compare it to the airbrushed Hollywood chimera that so many of us - even allegedly smart girls - have unwittingly internalized as the One True Shape, and find myself sorely lacking. I am a voracious, if silent, reader of weight loss blogs and journals, and more often than not, I recognize my own ambivalence and inner conflicts in those entries written during what a sadly forgotten writer refers to as the 3am of the soul.
I guess what I am trying, and failing, to say is that it isn't 'us against them'. We are all the 'us' - women, anyway -- not being a guy, I don't really know what they angst about when they look in the mirror. We are the Us, and those insidious purveyors of insecurity and self-hatred are the Them. I'm pretty sure, though, that there are more of Us than Them, so we can probably take 'em, easy. That is, if we can stop making ourselves feel like failures for not emulating human clothes hangers.
Long ago, when I apparently was hanging out in the shallow end of the tact pool, I knew a guy who had an absolutely rigid policy of never dating anyone who weighed more than 120 lbs. There was no point in even discussing the subject with him, or pointing out that, should he fall head over heels for a girl who was, say, 5'8 or 5'9, and the perfect beanpole of his dreams, she might actually weigh more than that and still be thin as a rail; he didn't want to hear it. Some people are just fixated on a number, to the utter exclusion of logic and reason.
By the way, I hope that it is alright if I post comments here -- I am fascinated with media and body image issues, and I really empathize with the difficulties in finding that delicate balance between being health-conscience, and unhealthily obsessed with an unrealistic ideal of cadaverous beauty.
I'm not technically overweight, but when I catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, I can't help but compare it to the airbrushed Hollywood chimera that so many of us - even allegedly smart girls - have unwittingly internalized as the One True Shape, and find myself sorely lacking. I am a voracious, if silent, reader of weight loss blogs and journals, and more often than not, I recognize my own ambivalence and inner conflicts in those entries written during what a sadly forgotten writer refers to as the 3am of the soul.
I guess what I am trying, and failing, to say is that it isn't 'us against them'. We are all the 'us' - women, anyway -- not being a guy, I don't really know what they angst about when they look in the mirror. We are the Us, and those insidious purveyors of insecurity and self-hatred are the Them. I'm pretty sure, though, that there are more of Us than Them, so we can probably take 'em, easy. That is, if we can stop making ourselves feel like failures for not emulating human clothes hangers.
I'm currently 205, at 5'8", clearly on the larger size to look at, but I have enough of a waist that most people would probably not peg me at over 200...because I'm not blob-shaped I suppose. That has everything to do with what someone's mental image of "over 200lb" really is.
All of our cultural ideas of how a woman should hover around the 100lb mark, or the 120 mark, were formed when most women were UNDER 5'5". Namely: when my 5'2" 120lb grandmother was a young newlywed in the 1930's and counted as "averaged sized" among her peers. My sister is exactly the same height as me, and she grew up as a pointy-boned beanpole, now she's over 130 it freaks her out. She was never dangerously underweight though. Just a naturally skinnier person.
I got close to dangerously overweight at 245 at my highest, but didn't stay there long enough for the health effects to start kicking in.
My personal goal weight is about 175, because I want to see how it feels to be 30lb lighter, and I might decide I need to go further once I get there. Having had my body fat taken and calculated that my lean mass alone is almost at the top of the range recommended for me by the BMI scale I decided that a goal weight was less important for me than a goal body fat% of 25-30% and a goal feeling of "having more energy and much stronger muscles".
I'm extremely grateful that so far my doctor and her physician assistant have been very engcouraging of the 175 goal, even though the little chart on their wall screams 160 as a "healthy" weight for me. Brainless doctors have a lot to answer for. They're even worse than obnoxious old men in bars, they're supposed to know better.
I think a lot of people (and while I hate to generalize, most of them are men) need a huge reality check as to what certain weights actually look like.
Before I started going out with the great guy I am dating now, I perused a lot of personal ads sites. The vast majority of men looking for women specified they wanted a woman with a "slim" or "athletic" body type. Many of them specified that their potential dates had to be "5'2" to 5'11" and 90 to 135 pounds" or some other such rubbish. That always got my goat because 135 pounds on someone 5'2" is going to look vastly different than 135 pounds on someone 5'11"!
One time when I was hanging out on the couch with my boyfriend and he said he had to get going soon, I laid on top of him and said "You're not going anywhere until you move 130 pounds of me" and his first response was not "mm, let's get it on" but rather "you weigh 130 pounds??? Really???" with utter disbelief. I'm definitely not what you would call thin, but i'm not fat either, and I spent the time between the ages of 13-22 being moderately overweight (150-165 pounds on a 5'3" frame), so I'm just as fucked up about food, weight and body image as anyone else. Anyway, my guy thought I weighed much less than 130, and my response was "nope, this is what 130 pounds looks like." He said "it must be your heavy Polish bones." hahaha.
But anyway, like you all have said, there is no magic number that anyone of a certain height or build should aspire to. We are all different, and any idiot who would refuse to date someone based solely on a number on a scale is not worth being with period.
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