Thursday, October 04, 2007

What Women Actually Look Like

Drop what you are doing and check out the Illustrated BMI Categories Project.
The collection includes photos of women along with their weights and body mass index numbers. The pictures show normal looking women who are technically overweight, thin women who are normal weight, and supposedly obese women who look like pretty much everyone you know.


About freakin' time.

Via Tara Parker-Pope, author of the new and fantastic blog WELL, at NYtimes

6 comments:

a.maria said...

dani's my height. and weighs my goal weight. and is "normal", which mean's i'm probably "obese".

*sigh*

i want to be Dani!!
(totally not the point of your post. but... i don't care! so there!!)

21stCenturyMom said...

If nothing else this points out how very unreliable BMI is as a metric. It is particularly irrelevant for athletes and other people with lean body mass.

Some of those women do fit the lable and some do not. Totally unreliable. Yeah.

LBTEPA said...

Hey, I know Shauna,she's grouse!
I'll be sending that link to everyone I know.
signed
still 'overweight' by 8kg *blows raspberry at sucky BMI*
What enrages me is this bodgy measure both fuels women's insecurity and also feeds into the whole 'obseity epidemic'/fattism thing. Have you seen junkfoodscience.com (may not be coorect, the link is on Nancy Toby's page. Excellent.

David said...

I like the girl with the pumpkin. Great smile. Nice hair. Cute.

I have to tell you that I just don't see many "obese" women at running events. It's the only world I know.

Anne said...

Thanks so much for pointing out this to us. It backs up that earlier CRN story I did about athletes and BMI. And I agree with you that the WELL blog is a great addition to the NYTimes.com.

Old School Runner said...

While I was sad that Tara Parker-Pope left the Wall Street Journal, I'm glad to see that she has a new gig at the Times. She is a great writer.