BMI (Bloody Mean, Idn’it?!): A New Perspective

Preface:
     The other day I posted a blurb about my current BMI.  A few of my friends told me where I can stick my BMI, in a good-naturedly way of course :)  While their comments were meant to be nice, I remembered a lot of occasions where I’ve heard less than nice things, and it also triggered a lot of memories and some strong feelings about an issue that seems to only have one side in the public’s view.  I joked about being much closer to malnutrition than obesity :)  But I wasn’t joking.  I’m happy to be healthy enough to get up off the couch and be active once again.  Even if I wasn’t really going to slump over and fall off a rock, dead.



BMI (Bloody Mean, Idn’it?!): A New Perspective

     We’re all victims.  No matter how many toes we dangle off the edge, whether we stand tip-toed, on one foot, jump on and off again in less than a second, or think thin thoughts, the scale still seems to sense every pound.

     We’re not just victims of the bathroom scale, though.  We’re also caught up in society’s physical attractiveness scale.  Since birth we are bombarded with images of thin people dancing across the stages, posing for magazines and acting on movies and television shows, not to mention the wire-thin dolls and buff action figures that line the toy store shelves.  It’s unclear whether they’re trying to depict real society or they’re telling us that’s how we are supposed to look.  The effect is the same: it’s what we see so it’s what we expect people to be like, whether consciously or subconsciously it has become our paradigm.

     My problem’s a little bit different though.  I’m one of the thin people.  So is my immediate family.  Ever since high school I’ve been told how lucky I am that I have a thin body and how easy it must be for me.  I’d almost start believing them if I hadn’t grown up with this same body they say I’m lucky to have.  My sister is the same way.  She’s given birth to three kids now and is still thinner than me—we’re the same height.

     How can I call this a problem?  It’s very simple.  We’re all victims and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  A comic my dad once gave me showed four cows standing in four different pastures that all came to one point—four quadrants like the Four Corner’s states, right?  Each cow had his head underneath the barbed wire eating the grass from the field on her (they weren’t bulls) right.  My body has been the same way for me.  While people tell me how great it is to be wire-thin, I remember how it was growing up being wire thin.

     You see, long, long ago in a junior high school far, far away that I never want to go back to and hardly care to be reminded of there was me: the skinny kid that had few friends, didn’t know how to act, couldn’t get a girlfriend to save his pathetic junior high school social life, and was skinny.  The best (read: worst) part of being skinny in junior high is that everyone bigger than you can pick on you.  And does.  That equated to most everyone there, including the 7th graders when I got to 8th grade.  This was so much the case (at least in my mind) that I grew up having less and less desire to try to talk to anyone.  There were plenty of people who had it worse than I had it, I’m sure.  But for the first 17 years of my existence I didn’t really realize that.

     The effect didn’t last just 17 years, though.  Right out of high school I signed the papers at the recruiting station and committed the next 6 years of my life to proving to the world that I wasn’t just some wimpy, skinny kid.  I wanted to be somebody.  And the fun of being skinny continued with gale force.  In boot camp, I calculated the weight of a loaded ALICE pack, flak jacket, Kevlar helmet, boots and uniform, rifle and whatever other crap we had to carry at about 70 – 80 lbs.  I don’t know where I got my figures from at that time but they weren’t at all unreasonable.  But at 137 pounds fresh out of high school, the weight was unreasonable.  Have you ever tried hiking up a mountain carrying half your body weight?  70 lbs is a lot different at 137 lbs body weight versus 180.  Don’t believe me?  Load up the old bookbag you used to haul around with you at school and throw it on your 10 year-old kid and see how they do.  I’m not saying I couldn’t do it and that nobody else had a hard time of it, including the people lucky enough to be built with a nice, large framed body.

     I mentioned that my sister gets some of the same flak that I do.  Let me tell you a little about her high school experience.  I’ll be pretty direct here too, be warned.  About the time that girls start developing hips and a chest—the elements that high school boys rate a girl by, and probably a lot of grown-ups too who haven’t quite figured things out—my sister didn’t.  She was flat as the asphalt track she used to run on and about as shapely as the pole she would high jump over.  I don’t suppose any of us would have the nerve to say that the ability to high jump well because of her body type was a great trade-off for being largely ignored by the male student population—at least in the high school mindset.  Some years later, now, she has people regularly tell her that they hate her for being skinny, and one neighbor told her that she looks like Olive Oil from Popeye.  I'm not sure the word "hate" is a very positive one, even when used in "jest", nor that the image of Olive Oil is quite what my sister was hoping for during all those years she hid in her bedroom with the door closed reading books.

     I hope readers aren’t tempted to offer the cold consolation or preach the fallacious philosophy that it was only elementary and high school: you get over it.  It’s not true.  Consider: those 17 years are the formative years of your life.  How you experience life and how you are taught to react to it largely shapes your future.  That’s not to say you don’t become more and more aware, and more and more responsible for your actions.  But breaking a cycle that started since you were very young is difficult.  Ask any lifetime smoker who has ever wanted to quit.  Beyond the chemical addiction comes the difficulty of a lifetime of habit built up where the smoker hardly remembers anything different than smoking.  A friend of mine started when she was five years old; I was naïve enough to tell her to “just quit.”

     Having that paradigm of needing to be bigger than I am in order to fit the right body image drove me to weight lifting.  It wasn’t so much an addiction; I actually enjoyed it and put it to a practical use in the military.  The trouble was that in order to gain weight I had to constantly eat heaping platefuls of food and spend hours in the gym every day.  The fattest I’ve ever been was also when I had the most muscle on my body, and it was at the end of my active duty training.  When I got done, went home and didn’t have a gym anymore I dropped about half the weight I had gained over the period of several very active months all within the first month or so, and most of the rest over a couple more months.  It’s not like I quit doing pushups or running hills, my body simply dissolves itself rapidly when it isn’t constantly being exercised.

     One of the scariest examples of this is a very recent experience.  Up until last year, I’ve managed to stay at least a few symbolic pounds over my high school weight.  I generally had the DMV write that I’m 150 lbs on my driver’s license, which helps me maintain the hope and illusion that “if I really wanted to I would be that weight.  I just have to start working out again.  …next month.”  But last year I got mono.  My average to low activity level shot through the floor.  I spent about a month or so in bed not eating much, and the following couple months not eating much more and definitely not working out.  My body weight did the same thing it did after active duty training, only this time I didn’t have the built-up muscle and fat to lose.  You want to tell me about not having energy because of being too big?  Believe me, it’s the same feeling when your body has no fat and it has to consume muscle in order to operate.  Ok, so that’s a small stretch—I’m not as small as the starving children in Africa.  But that’s a bit how it feels.  Yes, I feel bad for the guy who has to carry around a lot of extra fat and then tries to start running.  I understand.  I used to do pull-ups and dips with iron plates tied around my waist.  But can that same guy see it from my perspective?  At least he has muscle to move that fat around.  For me, it feels like all I have are bones to try to do the same work his muscles are doing.

     In all honesty, I don’t expect anyone to be convinced that it’s so much harder for me.  Not any more than I think I should have to feel that it’s so much harder for anyone else.  We’re all like those cows trying to eat out of the other pasture where the grass is always more luscious, no matter what your own looks like.  From my side of the pasture, I’m just tired of the echoes of 17 years’ worth of hearing people yell at me and tell me that I’m not good enough because I’m too skinny, and another 13 years of hearing people yell at me and tell me that I’m horrible because I’m so lucky to be skinny.  Maybe for the next 30 years we can change it up and just treat me nicely for being a human being and not discriminating based on what I look like.

Work

Trisha accepted her offer in Baltimore so we're heading out that way now.  While I can't go to school now and nobody's accepted my applications for work, at least there should be some options for both in that area.  In fact, there are some PhD programs that are a little more up my alley and jobs too all right around there.  At the least I figure we could get a house for a few years and have me renovate it some, and finally get a garden!