Try this experiment. If you are tending to overweight ( Body Mass Index (BMI) 25 or over) then try to get to BMI 18.5 -24.9.  If you succeed people will decide you have lost ‘too much weight’  even when your BMI is in the middle of the normal range. If normal was defined as ‘what is most common’ then to have a ‘normal’ BMI is unusual and we may have become blind to normal so that what we perceive as ‘normal’ is not ideal. Rates of overweight and obesity are now at 60-70%.

In an Australian study on the public perception of body size the authors report that:

Overweight participants were also most likely to incorrectly identify themselves as a healthy weight (67 per cent, p<0.001), compared to 12 per cent of obese participants . The majority (89 per cent) of normal weight participants accurately identified themselves as being a healthy weight. Flanagan et al

Therefore it is not surprising that when people are challenged about their weight in healthcare they are reluctant to identify the issue as a problem.

Photo by Gesina Kunkel on Unsplash