The illustrated BMI

After earning through childbirth and age, a right to spread out a little, I’m happy to say I am just very slightly underweight, at 45, and in good shape; I eat very healthfully and get regular excercise.

I live near a college campus – in fact, I belong to the gymnasium there, and run around the lakes and up and down the paths as part of the excercising I mentioned.

It has been very startling to see the young women, half my age and note the difference from my generation…. how things have changed since “my day”… while there are of course many specimens of lovely, sleek figures you would expect of 18-13 year old women on a campus of directed, high achievers from privileged backgrounds…they are the exception, rather than the rule they were when I was not one and twenty. When I was young, girls were almost uniformly slender, with the odd fatty or skinny tossed in the mix.

The modern bell curve seems to exhibit new trends. normal at one end, LARD ASS for the bulk of the bell, and ill-looking skeletons on the other end.

Its amazing. The girls are carrying at least 10 -15 more pounds on average than they did a generation ago.

Men may in general be carrying more weight, but what I observer on the campus is that young women, as opposed to the young men, are carrying conspicuously more weight – compared to 20odd years ago.

Oddly enough, the boys on campus seem to be trending shorter in the demographic observed –
(That would be (in general) self-directed, high achieving students with backgrounds of real privilege.) In general they aren’t carrying the extra weight the young women are.

I think they should have special tables for men and women, muscle percentage of body weight should be given consideration. Some of the athletes pictured did not appear obese.