Question Diet Culture

If you've spent any time with us, you'll know we've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with BMI.

Actually ... forget that.

We'll settle for "a severe, distinct and long-standing dislike."

(mainly because Nicky isn't a fan of the word hate ... although BMI pushes us dangerously close 😅)

For years we've questioned why a simple calculation based on your height and weight continues to be treated as the gold standard for measuring health, despite its well-known limitations.

BMI doesn't know whether you lift weights or spend your evenings on the sofa.

It doesn't know how much muscle you have.

It doesn't know where you carry body fat.

It doesn't know about your blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, fitness, sleep, hormones, stress levels or mental wellbeing.

It certainly doesn't know you.

Yet time and time again, women are judged, reassured, denied treatment or made to feel they've somehow failed because of a number that was never designed to assess an individual's health in the first place.

The article in the link below was published back in 2022.

Yet here we are, years later, with BMI still influencing access to treatment, surgery, medication and healthcare decisions every single day.

If the limitations of BMI have been recognised for so long, perhaps it's time we started asking more questions.

Not because we want to challenge healthcare professionals for the sake of it, but because good healthcare should welcome informed conversations.

So next time BMI is used to make a decision about your health, don't be afraid to ask:

Why is BMI being used in my case?

What evidence supports using it for this decision?

Are there other ways my health could be assessed alongside BMI?

Questions aren't about being difficult.

They're about making sure the care you receive is based on the best available evidence, not simply on what has always been done.

This conversation feels personal for both of us.

On paper, according to BMI, we've each spent years being told where our "healthy" weight should be.

In reality, we've both discovered that the weight at which we genuinely feel our healthiest, strongest and happiest is actually a little higher than the top of our so-called "ideal" BMI range.

That technically places us in the "overweight" category but neither of us feels unhealthy there ... quite the opposite.

For years, diet culture convinced us that the goal was to keep chasing the "healthy" BMI range. We were led to believe that if we could just reach that magic number, we'd finally be healthier, happier and somehow ... enough.

Beth now looks back and believes that constantly striving to maintain an unrealistic number on the scales became one of the many factors that contributed to years of disordered eating. 

Nicky's experience has been different, but the feeling is remarkably similar. She realised she'd spent years measuring her success against a chart instead of trusting her own body. 

Instead of asking, "Do I feel well?" she found herself asking, "Does this number say I'm doing well?"

So perhaps the real question is ...

Why are we still allowing a calculation that was never designed to assess an individual's health to tell us whether we're healthy or not?

Surely we can do better than that.

These days, we'd much rather ask ... 

• Am I sleeping well?
• Do I have energy?
• Am I getting stronger?
• Can I do the things I love?
• Do I feel like myself?

Because those answers tell us far more about our health than a chart ever could.

If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, chances are you were taught that fat was the enemy.

Butter? Swap it for low-fat spread.

Full-fat yoghurt? Absolutely not.

Salad dressing? Better leave that off.

And if a packet proudly shouted "99% Fat Free!", we were expected to throw it straight into the trolley because it had to be healthy.

Except ... who said that?

The answer, in many cases, was diet culture.

For decades, we were taught to fear foods simply because they were high in calories, Weight Watchers points or Slimming World Syns. 

Avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil and full-fat dairy often ended up on the "be careful" list, not because they lacked nutritional value, but because they didn't fit neatly into a diet plan.

Meanwhile, many highly processed products were celebrated simply because they were labelled "low fat", regardless of what had been added to replace the fat.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether a food was nourishing and started asking whether it was allowed.

For years, the message to cut out fat was repeated so often that many of us stopped questioning it. Somewhere along the way, "low fat" became confused with "healthy" and "eating fat" became confused with "gaining body fat."

We now know the picture is far more complicated.

Fat isn't just something we eat, it's something our bodies need.

Healthy fats help us absorb vitamins A, D, E and K, support hormone production, keep our brains and nervous system functioning well, protect our organs and often help us feel fuller for longer. 

Ironically, many of the "low-fat" products that filled supermarket shelves had to replace the missing fat with something else to make them taste appealing, often added sugar, refined starches, salt or extra processing. 

That's not to say all fats are equal. They're not.

Trans fats are best avoided, saturated fats are generally best enjoyed in moderation, and unsaturated fats from foods like olive oil, nuts, seeds, avocados and oily fish have consistently been associated with health benefits. 

The point isn't that we should fear fat, it's that we should stop fearing all fat.

Because once again, nutrition turned out to be far more nuanced than a catchy headline or a brightly coloured label on the supermarket shelf.

So the next time you see "Low Fat!" splashed across the front of a packet, perhaps pause before assuming it's automatically the healthier choice.

Ask yourself ...

What have they taken out?

What have they put back in?

And, as always...

Who says?

This is one of those topics that always makes Beth stop and think.

For more than 25 years, she avoided foods like nuts, olive oil, avocados and full-fat yoghurt because she'd been taught they were "too calorific."

Yet during years of binge eating, she thought nothing of eating an entire cake, packets of biscuits or family-sized bag of crisps in one sitting, all foods packed with highly processed fats that never seemed to carry the same warning labels.

The irony isn't lost on her.

There's absolutely no evidence to suggest this had anything to do with her thyroid eventually failing or later developing thyroid cancer, and there's no way of ever knowing if it played any part.

But considering the thyroid is a gland highly dependant on healthy fats, it does make her wonder.

How many of us spent decades avoiding foods that nourish our bodies because we were scared of the calories, while feeling no guilt at all about eating ultra-processed foods that happened to be labelled "low fat"?

Perhaps that's the real lesson.

When we reduce nutrition to one number, whether that's calories, fat grams or BMI, we risk missing the much bigger picture.

Maybe it's time we stopped asking ...

"How many calories does it have?"

and started asking ...

"What does this food actually do for my body?"