As I said yesterday, childhood obesity is an issue in the United States.  Children from toddlers to teens spend too much time being sedentary.  To me, as a parent, the big question is how do we measure who is and isn’t obese or even overweight as that may lead to obesity.  I have some large concerns that we just lump everyone into tool, such as a BMI calculator, without some guidance from professionals.

I went looking back into my archives as I was sure I wrote about my daughter’s experience with physical education class and the pinch test with calipers.  At the time, I think my 5’2″ daughter might have weight 115 and was in high school.  She may have weighed less than that as I do not recall and could not find a previous writing about this incident.  The issue was that the PE class would use calipers – not sure anyone uses these any longer – to tell a student if he/she was overweight or not.  My daughter, in consecutive years, would have this rudimentary test show that she weighed too much.  As a parent, I would complain that this type of testing was setting up teens for eating disorders as there was no way that my daughter – who will claim she is 5’3″ because she is more then 5’2″ and a half – was not fat.  She may not have been as toned as she should have been but I would never agree she was fat.

Along comes the push by many people to start using BMI (body mass index) as an indicator that a person is overweight or obese.  Let me start by saying I do not believe using any single item to indicate such a critical health issue is intelligent.  So many variables can make such an instrument valid or void.

Take person one who is me, a mother of six who started a journey to a healthier lifestyle over three and a half years ago.  At that point in time, I weighed the most I had ever carried on my 5’4″ frame.  I also had a BMI of 33.  You can read more about my journey, which is still in progress, at Healthy Lifestyle Journey – Part I and Healthy Lifestyle Journey – Part II (I think a part 3 is in the works as an update).  To this day, I have lost 65 pounds and dropped my BMI to 27.5.  I am still considered overweight.  I probably am still overweight.  The problem is that I do not feel overweight.  I am not sedentary.  I am, in many people’s minds, extremely active to possibly obsessive about my exercise.  I am a marathoner.  I run road races regularly.  I am not, at least not in writing, an overweight person.

Let’s look at a teenager.  He is 16 for another two plus months.  He is 5’11” and weighs 178.  He is active, moreso during the summer months but active none the less.  He bikes approximately 1000 miles a year.  He occasionally plays tennis.  He occasionally, less than the tennis, rides horses.  He mows neighbor’s lawns in the summer as a part-time job.  His BMI is 24.  He is considered overweight.  He is rather picky about what he eats and does enjoy a soda when it is offered.  He likes vegetables and cookies.  He is a culinary arts student at the local BOCES.  Do I think, if I were to look at this teen, that he is overweight?  No, not really.  As a mother, I would probably wonder if the child eats enough.  Also, as a mother, I would probably figure this teenage boy never stops eating.

Another example is a 20 year old college student.  He has been a student athlete with practices six days a week on top of weight training and other activities.  When not in season, he also workout by both running and doing a series of weight training exercises.  He is 5’8″ and weight 199.  He admits he would like to drop a few pounds.  His BMI is 30.3 and puts him in the obese category.  He is not by any means obese.  He has a lot of muscle on his body.  Are there areas in his health he could improve?  Undoubtedly.  Is weight one of them?  Possibly.  Is weight the only one?  Definitely not.

Weight, while a singular measure, is not an independent point in any person’s health.  Weight is co-dependent with nutrition, activity, allergies.  You get the picture.  While I understand the need to have a tool to measure obesity, I am not sure that one tool – stand alone – is the answer.  Too many items go into being healthy that one stand alone tool – such as BMI – cannot measure a person’s health in regards to obesity.

How do you feel about BMI?  Do you think schools should measure, in some manner or another, whether students are overweight or not?  If so, what do schools do with this information?  Should information that cannot be acted on by the school really be measured?  Is one stand alone tool for measuring obesity the answer to the childhood obesity crisis in the United States?