Weight Distribution Curve
I like that in this world there is difference. I think it makes things interesting and exciting. You can call this a preference and an opinion, but I value the fact that people come in a range of shapes and sizes.
Some people in the fat acceptance movement are fixated on the idea that we have to convince the world that fat is beautiful. But I don’t come from that perspective.
I think we should see ourselves as beautiful. And I think we should work really hard to recognize the people in our lives that see us as beautiful.
But, it’s my opinion, that making fat a standard of beauty is just as detrimental as making thin a standard of beauty. You can’t stop people from valuing one thing over another. But you can show that humans naturally come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
The idea that we’ve gotten fatter as a nation hinges on the BMI scale and it’s classifications of underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.
I contend that those classifications are not only arbitrary but they also allow those arguing that fat is bad to skip over the part about how we’ve always come in a range of shapes and sizes.
If you plot out BMI and population on a graph you end up with a weight distribution curve. The curve looks kinda like a cat arching it’s back. A big hump in the middle and a sharply declining tail on each end.
When looking at the change of BMI in the population, over time, what we actually see is that weight distribution curve has shifted over a bit. This is because we’ve gotten a fatter and a little taller over time.
The shape of the curve really hasn’t changed. The population is still made up of a variety of shapes and sizes. Because, as humans, we are not all built the same. Subtle differences in the gene pool make us unique.
A similar U shaped curve can also be seen when you plot out BMI and mortality. Statistics suggest that at the extremes of the weight distribution curve morality goes up. Those who are super thin or those who are super fat die a bit earlier.
But those extremes count for a very small percent of the population. Not the highly quoted 60% of overweight people. We’re talking more like 7% and that counting those who are super thin AND super fat.
Oh, and when I say earlier, I mean it shaves like 10 years off you life. Unless your talking about people who are starving. They die a whole lot sooner.
My saying that I don’t we should make fat or thin the standard of beauty is a value judgment. But saying that humans come in a range of shapes and sizes is simply an observation.
My opinion is that beauty can be found in just about anyone. All you have to do is look for it. And I think the best place to start looking is within yourself.
Now that’s a value judgment I can agree with. Personally, for me, what makes a person beautiful isn’t just how they look - it’s a combination of looks, personality, sense of humor, compassion, and how they respect others. And for me, if a person isn’t “conventionally” good-looking but has all the rest, then they’re beautiful, to me (and if they are “conventionally” beautiful but don’t have the rest, then they aren’t beautiful, to me). Size has never entered into my determination of who is gorgeous and who isn’t - the boys I had crushes on in high school ranged from short/stocky/sorta fat to tall/fat to tall/wide shoulders/narrow waist/muscled to almost everything in between. Because what turned me on about all of them was that they all had the same sick, twisted sense of humor that I have, and when that’s present, what they look like just doesn’t matter to me, at all. I’m the same way with the women I have for friends - looks don’t matter, size doesn’t matter as long as we share the same sense of humor and the same values.
To be fair, I can’t think of a single person who advocates making fat *the* standard of beauty; I think most folks are just trying to debunk the idea that being fat makes one automatically un-beautiful.
That moving graph image has been scaled wrongly. Notice how the area under the smooth curve increases for the latter data? It should be the same for both. Also, having a bell shaped line for weight is probably a bad idea. It isn’t symmetrical.
John,
I created that GIF. Maybe I should have put “for illustrative purposes only,” but when scaling, I used the horizontal tick marks to keep it consistent (along with shift-resize so it wouldn’t get warped.) Horizontally, it’s identical. Vertically, there’s no way for me to know because there aren’t any vertical tick marks, but the box is the same size and comes from the same source, so I assume it’s using the same metrics. Obviously, that could be wrong, but the important part is the horizontal shift in the weights, not the vertical shifts. The bars go higher because the mean BMI did increase, so more people shifted to the middle.
Also, I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to the bell-shaped curve… that’s what the weight distribution is in this country: bell-shaped. Can’t get around that.
Peace,
Shannon