“I put ‘obesity’ in quotes because I personally find it to be a slur,” said anti-weight discrimination advocate Susan Vibbert, who serves on Project HEAL’s board of directors.

“Our society and social media say, ‘You have to be thinner you are not good enough unless you are thin.’ Nor can you be healthy if you’re not thin, whereas you can be healthy and large, just as you can be unhealthy and thin,” said registered nurse Joann Hendelman, clinical director of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.ĭon’t use sugar substitutes for weight loss, World Health Organization advises Even with all the backlash against “fat shaming,” weight stigma against the seriously overweight or obese remains deep-rooted, according to research. Yet critics say the term BMI has become a societal judgment by lumping individuals into arbitrary categories that perpetuate misconceptions about body weight. Research has found that as BMI climbs, so does the risk for chronic conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, respiratory problems, stroke, mental illness, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, physical pain and at least 13 types of cancer, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those studies, separating populations of people into weight categories by BMI works well. It was invented for researchers to use on masses of people to see how weight affects the development of disease and chronic health conditions. Short for body mass Index, BMI is nothing more than a crude measurement of a person’s body fat based on height and weight.

Cdc calculate bmi for children