#bmi is garbage

[lousydrawingsforgoodpeople]

early in recovery these labels rly bothered me

[hungercityhellhound]

Sometimes scientific journal articles have the best lines. I love scientists for this reason. Today's gem while reading about BMI.

"It (BMI) is mathematical snake oil."

I adore it.

[ennuidays]

hate to admit it here but ed bitches make me so mad

[drawingskiesblog]

lets see if this doctor visit will crush my self esteem and push me deeper into my problems with food and eating or if they will treat me like a person for once! (hint: its gonna be the former)

I just wish i didnt have to destroy myself so they will listen

[mental-mona]

TL;DR: BMI was meant as a measure of trends across populations not individuals, its assumption is that everyone is a white male Western European, its very formula was designed to graph well rather than anything scientific, and the cutoffs for overweight & obesity are completely arbitrary. This article does a great job of thoroughly explaining in simple language why BMI is such garbage.

[growandrecover]

hi,

im really scared bc im officially ✨overweight✨ and my ed has just been #triggered. any tips on how to avoid relapse?

Hey, anon.

I'm so sorry you're feeling this way. I'm really proud of you for reaching out and actively trying to avoid relapse. That's wonderful.

First up, if you can, stop weighing yourself, measuring, body checking, or anything else you may be doing. Your weight does not say anything about you. Absolutely nothing. If you're concerned about your BMI specifically (which I know a lot of people with eds get caught up in), it's all a bunch of garbage. It was made based off of cis white men, and does not take muscle mass into consideration. Even if you happen to be a white amab person, it's still a joke. If you can't stop completely, try to limit what you're doing.

Next, please make sure you're eating all your meals and snacks. My therapist has told me to do this, and I'm passing along the information to you guys. If you have to, set a schedule for yourself and stick to it with the best of your ability.

If you're someone who used exercise to lose weight in the past/if you exercise currently, you may want to lay off that until you're in a better headspace. Going along with this, if you wear a Fitbit or Apple Watch of any kind, taking it off may help avoiding triggers like your daily step count, calories burned, and your other exercise levels. I wore one for almost a year and took it off a few months ago. Surprisingly enough, my quick dips back into some of my ed behaviors have stopped. I finally realized that those triggers sitting on my wrist 24/7 had been messing with my head.

If you're able to/not already, get an adequate amount of sleep. I think we all know what happens when we stay up too late, letting our minds wander into our ed thoughts in the middle of the night. Low levels of sleep interfere with our mental health, which, in times like these, needs to be extra nurtured.

Try to look at it from someone else's point of view. If someone you knew came to you with this exact problem, what would you say? Would you want them to be kind to their body, to fuel it, and to take care of it? Probably, right? Or if that's hard for you to say to yourself, wouldn't you just want them to be free of their eating disorder?

This is pretty harsh, but your ed is trying to hurt you. It's trying to kill you. Whatever it needs to say to get you to engage in those behaviors, it will. It'll tell you that you're not as [adjective of your choice] or [another adjective of your choice] when you weigh more than you have in the past, but that's simply not true. As I said earlier, your weight is just a number. You deserve recovery. You deserve happiness. You deserve a life free of food rules and that nasty voice in your head.

If you're scared, I'm here to tell you: your ed will not fix anything. Losing weight will not fix the idea of yourself you have in your head, and won't make you magically like your body more. It wants you to think it will, but it won't. It only makes your life worse.

Something that helps me is looking at recovery posts on Pinterest or Tumblr. I love being able to see other people's thoughts and encouragement. It always inspires me to keep going, and I hope it'll do the same for you, too.

Whatever it is that triggered you is not worth all the pain and suffering that comes with an ed. I don't care if it was something somebody said or just a thought you had. Nothing is worth going back to your ed.

You can do this. I believe in you.

I really hope this was at least a little bit helpful, and I hope you're okay, anon. If you're not right now, you will be.

If I missed something, or you need someone to talk to, feel free to send me a message! ♡

[vampire-catboy]

Fucking hell I'm so sorry friend. There's so many studies out of Canada saying that BMI is (abslute garbage) not an indicator of if the surgery can be done successfully and should not be a major factor in surgical considerations and I am so sorry you're facing such medical fatphobia <3

Ironic you say that because I'm in Canada, they're the ones saying I might be denied 😀👍 but I did bring that up to the nurse who had called me about it and she was like "these are the practises in place and it can take a long time for the systems to change" so I just had to be like cool cool cool. I'm not doing well 😃

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

iv e said this before and ill probably say it again but i fucking wish google and advertisemsnt could stop showing me weight loss garbage apps. just cus im tracking my mental health and looking at fitness apps doesn't mean i want bmi indicator 2000: lose weight dramatically fast and impress your doctors. if anything the opposite is the goal i would like to be fatter actually. i just fucking hate this. i have some trauma around eating disorders and weight loss and it would be real fucking neat to not have that triggered just cus i looked at the 200 squats challenge app 2 months ago. i fucking. just wish society as a whole could just get off the weight loss as universally desirable train. and stop assuming that wanting to exercise is the same as wanting to lose weight. fucking gross

[daintyaw]

feelin absolutely GARBAGE because i hate eating things i don’t know the calorie content of especially when they aren’t what i consider healthy. i got food from my favorite vegan place i haven’t had in forever but i’m STRESSED. at least i’m still in a deficit and i will grind on the treadmill later. i’m losing weight pretty rapidly even with a few 1,500-1,700cal days and i think it’s because of how much i’ve been working out because i’m in the lower healthy bmi range

[cooking-with-hailstones]

Massive shoutout to my doctor, who when I asked "should I be working towards a goal weight?" she said "eh, BMI and numbers on the scale are kind of nonsense. Let's focus on you building muscle - I want you to work on doing cardio and resistance training"

🥹🥹🥹

(for reference I'm asking specifically about gaining weight. I'm a tiny person with an eating disorder and it's so nice to have a doctor say "BMI is garbage trash nonsense")

[eddie-rifff]

TW disordered eating body dysmorphia weight discussion absolutely do not read if you have an ed. unless you wanna get triggered badly probably.

im so fed up with being my current weight. i feel like i just keep gaining weight even though i stopped weighing myself because i hated seeing the number keep going up. i need to lose like 30lbs immediately. but i have so little discipline and such an insatiable sweet tooth and im so picky that all i eat is carbs and sugar and processed garbage but i HATE BEING THIS WEIGHT. my bmi used to be 18 now its 22. which is technically "healthy" but i dont want to be healthy i want to be stick thin. i want to be ig model thin. it drives me fucking nuts that i dont look like that anymore. my thighs and stomach are huge and i dont fit half of my old jeans that i was wearing just 3 years ago. i hate it i hate it i hate it

starting today im gonna try to lose 20lbs in 5 months, that would be a HUGE accomplishment because ive never LOST weight before, ive only ever gained it so i have no idea if i can actually do this lol. but im gonna make an attempt. i cant keep this up. its killing me on the inside. i really wanna get down 30lbs but i feel like thats a big ask being in my mid 20s but i think i can do 20 if i really really try. i just need to buckle the fuck down. i have to. i need to look different. its. making me insane. not that im not already insane.

[feedmegreenthings]

Looking for recommendations for a food diary app that does NOT focus on calories or weight or BMI.

Just looking to record foods in my phone, maybe track some stuff like sugar and fiber and sodium levels.

Not interested in any weight loss/diet culture garbage.

Any suggestions?

[porcelainchurch]

ok Hi im triggered ! my mum just described one of her friend's daughter as being super skinny and looking like she has an ed and now i'm just so competitive and feel like utter shitand i wanna kms . i looked up her ig and Yeah she def has an ed and now with my mum saying that i feel like i have to be skinnier than her to even consider myself sick and i HATE how my mum keeps pointing out emaciated people in public saying 'look they have anorexia' which enforces the idea that i have to look a certain way to be valid and i feel like my bmi of under 14 was bs and not even that serious at all !!!!!!! wtf am i on about i was never fucking sick in the first place i don't have a problem and never did i fucking hate myself AND i'm losing weight i'm just not that skinny yet because it's been Five Days (and even in these five days i've gotten noticably thinner bc i just Can't Eat more than one meal a day) i hate my mother sometimes even though i know she doesn't do it on purpose

she also had anorexia when she was in her twenties and i feel like she's belittling me even though i know that's not true and she just wants to help and 'scare me out of it' but it feels so fucking invalidating !

seriously i feel like utter fucking garbage i wanna die and just Starve even more i will go to extreme fucking lengths to prove to her that i'm just as fucking sick as all these other people i won't fucking quit until i have a heart attack and drop dead .

i just need someone to tell me i'm sick and valid. that my suffering hasn't been for nothing.

[jeanjauthor]

I thought about keeping quiet about this, but I just have to share.

While diabetes management is...difficult...for me due to ptsd and phobia issues, I did have a wonderful moment, so good that I cried happy tears during my meeting today with my new diabetes-specializing nurse practitioner.

She said she doesn’t care about me being fat.  She acknowledges freely that fat people can be healthy, and that skinny people can be unhealthy.  She doesn’t want me to lose weight for skinny’s sake.  Though it would help a bit with my metabolism, and help a lot more with my sleep apnea issues, losing weight is not her focus at all.  She just wants to get me healthy, genuinely healthy, zero fat-shaming whatsoever.

The American healthcare system (and frankly, most Western healthcare systems that I’ve heard about) are far too weight-obsessed to be comfortable around...or even to be safe around, since those practitioners can obsess far too much about the utterly false garbage measurement of “BMI”

But this person, this medical professional, spoke the absolute truth.  She doesn’t care about my weight.  She only cares about my health, and my health is not bound inextricably to my weight.

There are medical professionals who don’t weight-judge others...and there are more and more of them as our most up-to-date medical studies are finding out more and more that being fat isn’t something to be shamed about, worried about, or obsessing about.

Even now, many hours later, when I think back about what she said, how she said it...I still believe in her sincerity, and in her belief in me.

Her belief in my right to exist without body-shaming, and without weight-shaming.

That’s something that in my fifty-plus years of life on this planet is a genuine, and genuinely welcome, surprise.

[foxymoxy]

So since Monday I have lost 3kg (it’s Friday night here). I have walked 2 x a day to and from work (I wear my gym gear because when I say walk I really mean push myself to go faster and faster everytime to try and beat myself the day before and feel the burn in my thighs, calves and Achilles tendons and abs. I get to work dripping in sweat and shower then work, then change to gym clothes again and power walk home to my apartment gym and I either jog or cycle 20-30mins 5min intervals either OTT on hard resistance or sprinting switching between the two. Then I must stay in the gym a minimum of 1hour total everyday so I then go do weights for the the session. If I don’t do at least an hour I shouldn’t have bothered to go if I was going to be such a lazy piece of 💩

I must workout everyday or my anxiety is overwhelming. Burning calories is my stress reliever and I feel so sick and I can’t relax or sleep if I don’t work out. I try to eat one small meal a day but I slip up a lot. Working out is my way to counteract my mistakes and weaknesses in moments of hunger

I used to be so proud of being healthy but the reason I sometimes do 20mins cardio sometimes is the reality that I have no energy. I feel awful somedays but I just can’t give myself a break or day off - even when feeling extremely weak and whole body aching and nauseous. I now realise that I can’t stop and it’s become another ritual in a secret list of rituals I do daily in my pursuit for perfection and punishment for not being perfect already.

All those days since I started dieting at 10 years old I have wasted flogging myself and I am still ugly and fat and now I’m 41 years old and still struggling to achieve my goals for the perfect body and now I can add being old to the list 😤 I used to be a figure skater and everything was about being thin. Both my parents also obsessed about their weights and my uncles and grandparents as my dad’s side were all jockeys and my whole family was into horse racing - my dad used to run in a black plastic garbage bag to sweat the fat out in the middle of the day in 30 degree heat 🥵 and my grandfather weighted himself even at age 80 up to 8 times a day.

The reason I put weight on last time is I was stupid enough to get rid of scales in my house so I wouldn’t obsess (so stupid 😡). Goal weight is 50kg. So still In healthy bmi just.

I obviously don’t want it bad enough or I would have done it already and not stop or break when faced with the pain and fail.

[chilope]

its.... really interesting. spending a week with military doctors. because you have the normal shitty doctor stuff but then you also have all these doctors and researchers saying like. hey we are really not doing well in keeping our people healthy and there are some things we can do, even small simple things, that will make this better, and then you have like. the rest of the military that kind of sees service people as fodder and treats them like shit and then cares significantly less about non-service people and its like. hm. idk. it feels weird!!!

im right now in a session about womens health and the last speaker was talking about pcos and she specifically kept hitting on this one point - that *she* cares and lots of military medical officials care but COs and sargeants and the chain of command just couldnt possibly care less (not in those words) and she brought up how there are fucking facebook groups for female service members with pcos who are trying to manage their pcos related weight gain, and are primarily falling back on disordered eating because their jobs require them to meet bmi thresholds, independent of physical fitness. and its like. ive sat through dozens of these things where people spend a significant amount of time talking about falling recruitment numbers and desperately asking how we can get them back up and its like. idk maybe stop treating soldiers like fucking garbage? like. this one is really pissing me off because theres so much data thats just like. yeah once a soldier has a baby they stop getting promotions. their fitness dropped because they just grew an entire human so we essentially blacklisted them. why arent more women joining the military? and also all these fucking doctors and researchers standing up here going "hey this is why you have all these fucking problems, maybe consider idk not treating your service people like fucking shit" and then command just saying "nah"