Dear God Don't Bridge the Disconnect!

Fat is Bad! Bad I Say! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAD! ...Well, maybe not. So there's a study that showed that overweight people live longer than "normal" weight people (and that underweight die off faster than the severely obese). But the authors make a point of saying that this doesn't mean that fat is healthy (somewhat contradicting their data). What the Fuck? Seriously?

We think that having a bit of excess body fat is so bad that those whose research shows otherwise automatically react against it? Whenever a study shows how bad being fat is, there is no automatic counter about how most dieting may be counter productive (it messes with hormones and/or makes your body think it's starving and/or leads to reduced nutritional intake in the pursuit of lower calories). But a study that implies being a bit overweight isn't all that bad and that being skinny may be much worse? Must nip that bit of comprehension in the bud before people get any idea other than: be thin.

At the least the article should be an indication that the way we delineate fat, skinny and normal (typically read as "healthy") needs work, maybe we should shift things. Maybe we should stop using the idiotic BMI to determine this (I love that a bodybuilder gets a fatty character on the Wii). I've spent a few posts pointing out that healthy is disconnected to a large part from fat, and to an even larger part from weight. If you eat right and exercise you can be healthy, whether or not you lose weight, and weight gain in such case is probably good.

I'll add to this...having body fat is healthy. People without body fat must actually be careful not to burn more calories than they consume (extra calories burned will come from muscle). Fat may not have as much of the "lean times" need that it would have in centuries past, but we still have up and down times in terms of activity, fuel need and consumption that fat can smooth over. I'll grant that we don't need much fat to accomplish this, and men less than women, but dieting to lose (fat) weight is hard on the body, and moving to more healthy living without a focus on the scale or the waistline would produce better results for more people.