BMI, Witch Hunts, White Duplicity and “Changing the Perfect Picture”

The UK parliament report ‘Changing the Perfect Picture’ shares findings of research into the causes and consequences of ‘negative body image’.

Body image is their term, not mine. I don’t think it’s helpful. Well, it’s helpful if you want to stabilise the idea of personal pathology and not be seen as a feminist kill-joy. But helpful for disrupting individualism, healthism, ableism, neoliberalism, and derailing binary thinking? Not so much.

One recommendation is that the use of BMI-based healthcare is scrapped. An approach called ‘health at every size’ or HAES is proposed instead. (BMI stands for body mass index. It measures the relationship between our height and weight and generates a number. In BMI-based healthcare this number is wrongly used as an indicator of personal health.)

It is essential to use safe, effective metrics in healthcare. And BMI-based practice falls way way short of this. It is harmful. It cannot accommodate the health impact of trauma, oppression, surviving war, or make sense of epigenetics, for instance. It co-constitues fat stigma. You can read more here if you like.

BMI-based healthcare asks us all to uphold the neoliberal delusion that says there is no such thing as society. So yes, we need to understand what is wrong with BMI…