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CAMPOS: What is 'normal' weight?

By Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 14, 2009 at 12:05 a.m.

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What is Oprah Winfrey's "normal" weight? This question springs to mind in the wake of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's announcement that only about 30 percent of the nation's adult population is currently at what the CDC defines as a normal weight (according to these definitions, 34 percent of Americans are "obese," and 33 percent are "overweight. Three percent of us are supposedly underweight).

Winfrey's three-decade-long battle with her body is a classic example of the weight cycling almost all chronic dieters undergo. Her weight has fluctuated between 150 pounds (she achieved this about 20 years ago by losing 67 pounds after eating no solid food for several months) and 237 pounds. Three years ago, during a thin cycle, she weighed 160; today she weighs 200.

Winfrey is between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 7 inches tall, so it's worth noting that, even when she's in a thin period, she's almost always "overweight" according to the government's preposterous definitions. ("Normal" weight for her is supposedly below 155 pounds; she's currently "obese.")

Winfrey is, of course, both fabulously wealthy and a famously driven and hard-working person. If someone with her psychological and economic resources can't even achieve a normal weight, let alone maintain it, what hope is there for the other 145 million adult Americans who have failed to maintain a government-certified body mass?

In regard to that question, there's bad news and good news. The bad news is that it is quite literally impossible for the large majority of Americans to maintain the government's definition of a normal weight.

The good news - and this really can't be stated strongly enough - is that this definition is completely fraudulent. The notion that it's "normal" for adults to have a body mass index between 18.5 and 24.9 is a classic piece of social insanity. Indeed, it's every bit as bizarrely unscientific as declaring that a "normal" height is between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 9 inches.

(Anyone interested in a detailed debunking of this destructive nonsense can consult any of a host of recent academic publications, including books such as Eric Oliver's Fat Politics, Sander Gilman's Fat, Michael Gard's and Jan Wright's The Obesity Epidemic, and my own The Obesity Myth.)

It's actually hard to get one's mind around how crazy it is to claim that it would be "normal" for Oprah Winfrey to weigh less than 155 pounds. In fact her entire adult life is a testimony to how utterly abnormal it is for her to weigh less than that.

Adding yet another layer of craziness to all this is the fact that, even at her very thinnest, Oprah has always been more or less "fat" according to the extraordinarily punitive standards employed by and against contemporary middle- and upper-class American women. (In such circles, a 150-pound woman of average height is certainly nowhere close to what is longingly defined as "thin.")

Fortunately, there are some signs that Winfrey herself might be willing to start using her fame to start fighting back against at least some aspects of all this insanity. Although it's discouraging to hear her talk about being "addicted" to food - this sounds like someone saying she's addicted to air - it's encouraging that she's also saying it's no longer her goal to be thin.

Instead, she says she wants to be "strong, healthy and fit."

Those are eminently realistic goals - for her and for tens of millions of other Americans who couldn't possibly achieve a "normal" weight if their lives depended on it.

And a key to achieving those goals is to reject the absurd and destructive idea that staying within a very narrow and completely arbitrary weight range - a range, by the way, that doesn't even correlate with the best health outcomes - is somehow "normal."

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

Comments

  • January 14, 2009

    5:55 a.m.

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    ItsJustme writes:

    I decided the government's BMI was fraudulent and meaningless when I calculated that both my wife and me were "normal" if we both weighed 125 pounds. I'm 5'7 and she's 5'. Ridiculous. I would not be considered underweight until I weigh less that 118 pounds. Are you kidding me?

  • January 14, 2009

    7:34 a.m.

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    Mike_In_Hartsel writes:

    A bunch of government "brains" decided many years ago what was the ideal weight for what sizes. These charts do not take into account body fat, bone structure, genetics, or any reasonable factors to allow for variation. Typical government mindset.

    Who put the government in charge of telling us when we're overweight? If we keep listening to these hacks pretty soon they will believe they have the right to tell us what to eat, when to eat, and when to exercise. We need to tell the government to back off. It's none of their business.

  • January 14, 2009

    9:16 a.m.

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    anderson writes:

    Mike in Hartsel: "Who put the government in charge of telling us when we're overweight?"

    Who put the government in charge of dealing with polio or TB? It's a public health issue. Duh. I can't believe how incredibly ignorant and self-centered you people are.

    Paul Campos--similar to mehtods used in informationals or in talk radio dialogues--gives us a wholly one-sided argument--giving no credit whatsoever to the CDC, or acknowledgement of what they're trying to do. Instead, like any good propagandist, he gives us the impression that they're some evil entity out to do us wrong. He's also selling a book.

    Here's the cdc's discussion of what BMI means

    http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/healt....

    See how they qualify the use of the BMI as a measure. They're not dictating what someone's weight needs to be.

    Given:
    --Obesity is a significant health hazard (ask any medical doctor)
    --Far too many Americans (including children) are overweight, and the problem is growing (big picture).
    --(Little picture): your health and weight is also an individual issue. Any person with any sense will check with their doctor if weight is an issue, and listen to what the medical professional (rather than the book store confessional) says.

  • January 14, 2009

    10:47 a.m.

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    peterpi writes:

    If 67%, according to Mr. Campos, of Americans' weight is not "normal", that completely distorts the meaning of "normal".
    Mike_in_Hartsel, who put the government in charge of telling us when we're overweight?
    How about industry? Campos' use of a woman to illustrate his discussion is right on target. Who spends the most on diet, beauty, and fashion? Which gender is most of the diet advertising spent on? Which gender is expected by both genders to be thin?
    Women.
    Which gender most profits from this?
    Men.
    Paul Campos can be over the top, at times, in his diatribes about wieght and health, but he's right on target that American society has it in for women who do not fit the "norm". And what is the American "norm" for women? Unrealistically thin. What does this unrealistic "norm" cause? Women to spend billions of dollars on dieting, fitness plans, beauty salons, spas, always the newest fashions. I wonder who came up with "planned obsolescence" first? The fashion industry or the automobile industry?
    As a percentage of body weight, women have a higher fat percentage than men do. It's high time that women start accepting that they are who they are, they weigh what they weigh, and to stop having a small group of men, who are shamelessly making tons of money off them, tell them what they should eat, what they should wear, and what they should look like.

  • January 14, 2009

    11:22 a.m.

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    anderson writes:

    peterpi, what you say makes sense. Campos undermines his credibility on the issue, however, by telling us that obesity isn't really a health problem.

  • January 14, 2009

    12:13 p.m.

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    Woogford writes:

    Campos didn't say that obesity isn't a health issue. He's saying that the governments definition of obesity is out of line. I fully agree. I would bet that using the government definition nearly all, if not all, professional atheletes would be considered over weight or obese.

  • January 14, 2009

    12:22 p.m.

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    Wxdano writes:

    First,

    BMI is for epidemiology and public health. It works well in those areas, and of course, naturally, it is to be expected that there are variations outside the curve fit (so to speak).

    These incidences where individuals don't fit the BMI profile does not negate the usefulness of BMI. There is a large literature and plenty of robust empirical evidence supporting BMI. The larger the sample size, the more robust is BMI. If your sample size is one, you need to look at your methods. Or not, if the results are uncomfortable for the maintenance of your worldview.

    Second,

    Campos knee-jerks this faulty hasty generalization logic like so many ideological commenters before him.

    That is: there is a long line of conservatarian columnists before Campos that have argued this line. In the same way. Using the same words. And the same cherry-picking. And data mining. And and and.

    I suspect that this ideology finds overweight people an uncomfortable indicator that humans as totally in control and able to control their actions is a fiction. This undermines their ideology and so BMI must be demonized by any way possible, including hasty generalization, cherry-picking, demonization, quote mining, etc.

    The Invisible Hand (TM), it seems, also spends a lot of time stuffing people's mouths with cheap corn products and overprocessed "food" in expensive packaging.

    The Invisible Hand (TM) not being able to control its High Fructose Corn Syrup-cramming is convenient for the diet industry, the medical industry, the insurance industry, and the food industry, but inconvenient for the ideology maintenance industry.

    Best,

    D

  • January 14, 2009

    12:46 p.m.

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    anderson writes:

    Wxdano, very nice skewer.

    Woogford: "Campos didn't say that obesity isn't a health issue."

    Yes, he did, and has. He's less forthright about it in this essay, but it's a consistent theme in his remarks on this issue. In this essay, there are two indicators:
    (1) his denigration of the CDC--a non-partisan body of medical professionals whose mission is to promote good health--who clearly promote the idea that obesity is a health problem.
    (2) his comment: "a range [of weights], by the way, that doesn't even correlate with the best health outcomes" (no further explanation or justification for this conclusion given). As the misleading crowd often does, he leads you to a conclusion without providing any evidence.

  • January 14, 2009

    12:51 p.m.

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    anderson writes:

    woogford: "I would bet that using the government definition nearly all, if not all, professional atheletes would be considered over weight or obese."

    You apparently read Campos' essay but didn't read the cdc link I posted earlier, which speaks directly to your question.

  • January 14, 2009

    2:09 p.m.

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    hnbrown writes:

    I think you guys are missing the point here: People do not come in one size fits all boxes. It can be just as unnatural for Ms. Winfrey to get down to 150 pounds as it might be for someone else, who is exactly her height, to top 140. We are more than numbers on a chart.

    I know an awful lot of women who have practically killed themselves trying to hit and maintain that magic low number--and who wound up fatter from all the yo-yo dieting and weight cycling. If Oprah had never dieted she might well be thinner today than she is--and not as thin as she has been. But she'd likely be healthier, since research shows it's really, really bad for you to gain and lose large amounts of weight.

  • January 14, 2009

    2:48 p.m.

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    HopiMedicineMan writes:

    The thing that's different with insurance underwriting is it depends on long mortality experience and a not a Harvard study. Most insurance weight charts are fairly liberal.

    I will say that I've had family live to be 100 who were always obese, never bothered with modern dieting, prefering cured meats, cooking in lard, and partaking of alcohol and tobacco. What they had was joy.

    Attitude is everything. If you're happy, possess a sense of irony and are filled with joy and spite rarely, you should live to be 100. But then everyone wants to live a long life, but no one wants to be old.

    Anderson--YOU WORRY TOO MUCH.

  • January 14, 2009

    3:17 p.m.

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    anderson writes:

    hnbrown: I think you guys are missing the point here: People do not come in one size fits all boxes.

    I don't think anybody is missing this point, or disagrees. It's the rest of the story I disagree with.

    Hopi, anyone in your family who lived to be a 100, lived most of their life outside a fast food world. Anyone of mature years can see the change that's occured. When I was in 5th-grade, "the" fat kid in my class weighed 108 pounds. I remember as we snickered behind his back as he was being weighed. Today, that is nothing. The incidence of childhood obesity went up according to one paper I have 382% in about 30 years, starting in 1974. That's dramatic and it's having severe consequences. Meanwhile, Campos is telling us obesity isn't really a problem afterall, which is total nonsense.

  • January 14, 2009

    3:30 p.m.

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    Wxdano writes:

    hnbrown wrote:

    "People do not come in one size fits all boxes. It can be just as unnatural for Ms. Winfrey to get down to 150 pounds as it might be for someone else, who is exactly her height, to top 140. We are more than numbers on a chart."

    I suspect you aren't referring to me, as that is the point I made, but in the context of Campos' faulty reasoning and templated ideological talking points.

    Best,

    D

  • January 15, 2009

    10:36 a.m.

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    peterpi writes:

    HopiMedicineMan @ 2:48, what a wonderful post!
    It's a different context, but in the early 1990s, I knew people with AIDS who were called at that time "long-term survivors". Some used Western medicine, some used alternative, some a mix of both. Some tried the latest fad "cure" to be talked about, some stuck rigidly to their preferred option. Some ate healthy, some ate fast-food a lot. What they had in common was they were generally happy people, and by God, they weren't going to let the disease defeat them. Attitude explains not everything, but a great attitude contributes a lot.

  • January 16, 2009

    9:16 a.m.

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    gary writes:

    Well, almost everyone here has missed one very important aspect.
    EXERCISE.....
    Maybe Oprah and the rest of the fatties gain weight because of lack of excercise!!
    Eat more calories than you burn..equals...more weight.
    No matter what your weight is..if you do not exercise enough..you will probably have poor health and be over weight.

    Watch the Biggest Loser on TV and learn something.

    This includes you Paul Campos!