faux leather skirt (F21, $16)
lace tunic (nicole by Nicole Miller @ JCP, $12)
knee-high socks (Betseyville, JCP, $8/2)
boots (Big Buddha "Lana" via Amazon.com, $80)
Sometimes I don't realize that everyone doesn't know the things I know. I read a lot about body acceptance/fat acceptance - I read books, blogs, articles on the web... whatever I find interesting. It just occurred to me that everyone may not know the story behind the BMI chart.
For starters, BMI is not a measure of health, and should not be used as such.
BMI was developed in the 1830's by an astronomer, Adolph Quetelet, who wanted to find out if mathematical laws of probability could be applied to humans. He tested this by collecting the heights and weights of groups of people and charting them on a graph. From here, he noticed a range of weights in a specific height, he considered "normal" and anything outside of that range was considered "underweight" or "overweight". Interestingly enough, he also thought that the farther someone was from the "normal" range, the more they deviated in other areas, like social norms.
In the early 1900's, BMI was used by the insurance industry to calculate premiums, based on statistics gathered by Louis Dublin, of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. After much promotion by Dublin of early mortality based on weight, the BMI scale became what it is today.
Furthermore, in the 1990's, the World Health Organization lowered the BMI scale, making more than 37 million Americans "overweight" overnight.
Here are some celebrities that are considered "overweight" according to the BMI scale:
If you would like to read more about BMI, here's the Wikipedia entry. Most of my information here is from the book, Fat Politics by J. Eric Oliver.
To get your daily dose of body acceptance/fat acceptance, check out the blog Dances With Fat.
For starters, BMI is not a measure of health, and should not be used as such.
BMI was developed in the 1830's by an astronomer, Adolph Quetelet, who wanted to find out if mathematical laws of probability could be applied to humans. He tested this by collecting the heights and weights of groups of people and charting them on a graph. From here, he noticed a range of weights in a specific height, he considered "normal" and anything outside of that range was considered "underweight" or "overweight". Interestingly enough, he also thought that the farther someone was from the "normal" range, the more they deviated in other areas, like social norms.
In the early 1900's, BMI was used by the insurance industry to calculate premiums, based on statistics gathered by Louis Dublin, of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. After much promotion by Dublin of early mortality based on weight, the BMI scale became what it is today.
Furthermore, in the 1990's, the World Health Organization lowered the BMI scale, making more than 37 million Americans "overweight" overnight.
Here are some celebrities that are considered "overweight" according to the BMI scale:
To get your daily dose of body acceptance/fat acceptance, check out the blog Dances With Fat.
