Friday, January 14, 2011

MAINTAINING A HEALTHY WEIGHT

Southbury, Connecticut

I love our family practice doctor. We've been going to him for nearly thirty years. I literally "ran into" him when we were both out for a run in our old neighborhood. We ran along together for a while that day, and it came up that he was a physician. He said that he'd been a cardio-pulmonary specialist for some years, but decided to switch to family practice because he wanted to work with patients who would survive for a while...

However, BMI, the Body Mass Index scale the top poster details, is a crock. It was developed as a population analysis tool, not originally intended for individual diagnosis. It takes no account of body type, age, or of lean/fat ratio. It probably causes unnecessary anxiety at least as often as it offers useful warnings. I mean, in our culture with its obsession with thinness, how many overweight people don't realize they are overweight? That's not sour grapes, by the way. At 6'4" and 183 pounds, my BMI is 22.3, exactly "normal."

What do those busy people have in common in the second poster? A recent colonoscopy.

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