Have You Heard the News?

I'm sure anyone reading this has heard some news about the new federal statistical study that found that being overweight is not as unhealthy as once thought.

Here's what it comes down to: Over a year, people who are overweight are less likely to die than people of normal weight. People who are underweight are slightly more likely to die.

There are several thoughts about why this might be. One is that the ranges are simply wrong: The normal healthy weight for a human is higher than we had thought. This fits well with the emerging theory that exercise has a greater effect on health than previously thought. Part of the apparently unhealthy effects of gaining weight could really have been due to the accompanying decrease in physical activity.

Another theory is that some of the ill effects of weight gain can be offset with medicine, and that this is less true for some of the ill effects of being underweight. There are also reasons to believe that the diseases and failures of old age are less destructive of those with a little meat on them.

Yet another theory is that the effect is due to the study's use of BMI (Body Mass Index) as a measure of fitness. BMI is a simple height-and-weight calculation that does not take into account whether the weight is fat or muscle. If many of the overweight people are really just fit and heavily muscled, it's no surprise that they live longer.

I suspect, as most people do, that it's a little bit of each of these things and that further statistical studies will tease the truth out of the data.

None of this matters to me. Here's why:

The study defines normal weight as a BMI between 18.5 and 25. The overweight segment stretches from 25 to 30. These are the people least likely to die. When they say the study shows that being overweight isn't bad for you, they mean the people with BMI between 25 and 30. People over that will still have problems.

My BMI is 48.

That makes me morbidly obese, which is a fancy way of saying that my weight is a serious health concern. This is actually very good news, because when I started this diet, my BMI was 56, which made me super morbidly obese.

I've got a long way to go before I'm in the range where the new study would matter to me. At my current weight, getting down below 250 (nearly 100 more pounds to lose) would be a major achievement. My ideal is to get back down to my high school weight---before I went to college and sat at a desk all day---which would be 220 pounds. By comparison, the high end of the overweigh range for me is 215, so I'd still be obese.

It's hard to imagine that I'd ever get down below 200, and getting below 180 to the normal weight range seems downright silly.

By the way, they say that underweight people are more likely to die. Running the math, I'd be underweight at 132 pounds. Does it surprise anybody that a 5'11" guy weighing 130 pounds might have health problems?