The average American woman wears a misses size 16, or women’s plus size 20w, according to a recent study by the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology, and Education. Some would claim this means women in the United States are unhealthy, but that would be a myth. The most up to date medical studies show that size and health do not correlate.
Fitness comes in all sizes. Health is about being physically active, doing moderate exercise 150 hours per week. “Fit” is defined by the ability to climb two flights of stairs without becoming winded or the ability to walk briskly for an hour without having to stop. Guess what? Some obese women can do that, and some thin women cannot.
The European Heart Journal referred to the metabolically obese phenotype as “intriguing,” because according to the conclusions from a 2012 study, “Once fitness is accounted for, the metabolically healthy but obese phenotype is a benign condition.”
The National Cancer Institute discovered in 2012 that moderately obese people live approximately three years longer than people of normal weight. Let me say that again: Moderately obese people have been found to live longer than people of normal weight.
Cardiologist C. Noel Bailey-Merz told NPR that research showed overweight women who exercised regularly were less likely to suffer heart problems than women of normal weight who did not exercise.
The idea that fatness or obesity is unhealthy is a myth. What’s truly unhealthy is a sedentary lifestyle. Yet, no one gets bullied for being sedentary, they get bullied for being fat. So much so, that larger people get anxiety when clothes shopping or going to the gym. Fat people are made to feel as though they are less than just because they have some extra padding. Fat shaming is an example of thinner people finding a trait they can demonize in order to feel better about themselves, and they do it under the guise that they just want others to be “healthy.”
Australian Olympic swimmer Leisel Jones is overweight and has won eight medals. Rebecca Adlington is another overweight swimmer. Holley Mangold is an Olympic weightlifter and has weighed as much as 400 pounds. Olympic hammer thrower Amanda Bingson weighs 210 pounds.
“From 55 percent to 65 percent of obese people in our population were metabolically healthy in terms of biomarkers like cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure,” Director of the New York Obesity Research Center Weight Loss Program at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, Richard Weil, told the New York Daily News Weil also said that “obesity is far more complex than you think.”
Our country has unrealistic beauty standards, with the average female model being between 14 and 19 years old and wearing a size 0 or 00. That’s not a fair representation, and it’s not a healthy representation either. People come in all different sizes, and it’s time we start accepting that.
More than half of our adolescent girls practice crash dieting, fasting, self-induced vomiting, diet pills, or laxatives, according to National Eating Disorders Association. Forty-seven percent of elementary school girls said pictures in magazines make them want to lose weight. Fifty percent of girls between the ages of 11 and 13 believe they are overweight. According to the Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 35 percent of “normal dieters” progress to pathological dieting, and 20-25 percent of those pathological dieters progress to eating disorders.
Look at the above statistics and tell me fat shaming is okay. It’s not. It’s causing our children to have an unrealistic expectation on themselves and their bodies that is rooted in an arbitrary aesthetic that has absolutely nothing to do with health.
I applaud the obese athletes and celebrities and plus size models who can say proudly, “big is beautiful,” and mean it. It is. Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and health and size are not related. Let’s encourage one another to feel good and be healthy rather than shame one another in order to make ourselves feel better.