Stop Talking To Myself: What's In A Number?

It's going to be a relatively short post this week as school has me in between a bit of a rock and a hard place (the rock being finals and the hard place being a complete apathy towards anything finals related). The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I was having last week with a female friend. She had recently found merit in heavy resistance training (by way of CrossFit, but any port in a storm, I suppose...) and was telling me about how her body had been changing a lot in a relatively short time. She detailed how much she enjoyed how her body looked now and that she felt the addition of muscle was a positive thing. It was such a relief to finally hear a female talk about how she enjoyed actually working out and express positive feelings about muscle and weight lifting. My joy was short-lived, however, when she then dropped the following bomb: "It's great and all, but I hate that I've put on ten pounds."

So, I'd like to take a second to make something abundantly clear to you all: the number that pops up on the scale when you step onto it is nothing but that - a number. It does not, in and of itself, dictate your health and should not dictate your self-worth. Before I continue, yes, if you step on the scale and the number "3" pops up with some numbers behind it then chances are your health needs to be re-evaluated if you aren't a professional athlete (and even if you are, in many cases). High body weight is often an indicator of other health issues such as diabetes and high cholesterol (among many others), but this particular post is directed towards people within relatively healthy weight ranges stressing over a five pound shift.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me continue. The number that comes up when you step on the scale is a very arbitrary benchmark for how healthy, fit, or attractive you believe yourself to be. Weight fluctuates throughout a given day by the hour depending on a number of factors, such as hydration levels or whether or not your coffee has taken effect yet. Had a big lunch? Guess what? That food is sitting inside you. Did you finish off that giant bottle of water? How much did it weigh? Well, that's all inside you. It doesn't mean you got "fatter" over lunch. Also, weight by itself can be used as an indicator of the presence of underlying health issues, but in most cases (again, we are excluding examples on the extreme end of either side of the spectrum) it cannot be a diagnostic tool to determine health. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, but no P. Never P.) uses a type of measurement known as a Body Mass Index (BMI), where your weight in kilograms is divided by your height in meters squared (if you were wondering, I absolutely felt like this just then) and that number is compared to a set of norms to determine whether you are overweight and, as a result, "at risk" of having disorders associated with weight. Now, let's math:

BMI = kg/m^2. BMI=94.5/1.91^2. BMI=94.5/3.65. BMI=25.9

That is my personal BMI. Now compare it to the classification chart that goes along with BMI:

And this is me in grad school taking pictures for an exercise guidebook:

Now, I personally do not believe myself to be overweight and I think most people would agree. However, according to the BMI I am not only overweight, but well into the classification of it. How can such a widely used statistic be so inaccurate? I shall answer this question with a riddle. Which weighs more: five pounds of muscle or five pounds of fat?

In case you hadn't caught on, they weigh the same.

The BMI does not take into account overall body composition - percentage of lean mass (muscle, bone, tendon, etc.) compared to adipose tissue (fat). It simply looks at your weight compared to your height and pops out a number. Luckily, the BMI is not an actual diagnostic measure, but simply a tool used to determine whether an individual requires further investigation. Unfortunately, this need to assign everything a number value that determines good or bad is prevalent all throughout society. It is the same reason my friend still felt bad about putting on ten pounds, regardless of the fact that it is what we consider "good weight". Society simply says, "Weigh less than this number if you want to be happy/healthy/attractive" without considering the implications of such a demand. It is this reason that so many resort to devastating means (starvation, bulemia, pills, etc.) in order to simply slip below this magic number.

I urge any of you on a quest to improve your health to forego the scale. Find other means to assess your fitness such as improvements in your training, how your pants fit, or how you think you look naked. These will be much better indicators of progress and fitness as well as objective ways to protect and bolster your emotional well-being. You may be changing one day and realize simultaneously that not only are your jeans too big, but also that you have abs or that you can see muscle definition in your arm. These means to determine progress are far more appropriate and healthy than a measurement of how much gravitational pull the Earth has on you at that moment.

Training Song of the Week:

Live to Rise - Soundgarden

(Bonus points for the Avengers themed video)