[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 6, 2025] ©2025
Good health news always seems in short supply as you get older. So I was willing to take it as a win when my primary care doctor commented a while back, “Well, at least you’ve aged out of early-onset dementia!”
If it’s New Years, every magazine cover will be featuring articles about diets. So it seems a particularly appropriate time to redefine one’s fat. I was intrigued to read an article recently that the dreaded BMI (Body Mass Index) that has declared me a porker for some years now is being replaced by a new index called the Body Roundness Index (BRI).
Criticisms about the BMI maintain that it was developed on data only from men, most of them white, and doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex, and gender diversity. Even Olympic athletes can be classified as borderline obese using its metrics. The BMI can apparently not differentiate body fat from muscle mass.
But this new BRI focuses on body roundness with the roundest bodies having the highest risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and other afflictions.
I was greatly encouraged at the thought of dumping the dreaded BMI which always seems to be staring me in the face whenever I go onto my doctor’s web portal. That BMI number is like being greeted with “Welcome, Chubs! And how is our adiposely-amplified self today?”
But after reading more, this roundness thing gave me pause.
This is because I have a really oddly constructed body. Back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted. And probably did. I can only assume she was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development.
For example, I recently saw a beautiful choker necklace in a catalog and knew I had to have it. But when it arrived, I discovered that the model had one thing I didn’t have: a neck. This part of me isn’t really a weight issue so much as anatomy. Unlike the swan-throated model, my head seems to sit directly on my shoulders making choker wearing problematical at best.
As it turns out, I’m also missing a waist. Of course, I make up for it by having multiples of other parts, like chins. And thighs.
I also have really short arms for my height. Anything that otherwise fits me is going to have a sleeve length that makes me look like an orangutan. I could always solve the sleeve thing by ordering a petite size, but I wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath in a garment that is cutting off circulation to my internal organs.
Women’s clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts. They are not designed for those of us with three thighs and no waist and little T-Rexy arms. Which I think we’ll all agree is good news. But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.
If there is one downside of being overweight, other than the potential of an early death, it would be clothes shopping. I would chat it up with the personal shopper at Nordstrom who would inform me that they usually only order one size 16 in any particular style and those are so in demand that she immediately pulls them for her regular customers. Now, I’m not in retail, but if I had a size that was instantly selling out, I’d order, well, more. But I’d be missing the point. Once you get past a certain size, department stores don’t want you waddling around in there among the osteoporotic svelte.
Chunker departments, where they even exist, are invariably hidden in a corner of the third floor which you can spot from fifty yards: racks of nasty brown, navy, and black polyester slacks, and skirts with hideous floral prints in colors not found in nature. We chunkies just hate wearing this stuff – a point that I routinely note in the feedback box at Nordstrom Oinker. (It’s actually Nordstrom Encore, but if you say it fast it comes out sounding like Oinker, which, in fact, I am convinced is the subliminal meaning in that choice of word. What, after all, does “encore” have to do with fat people?)
I wasn’t always fat. Prior to my divorce many many years ago, I always wore a size 4, which in today’s deflationary size market is probably a 2, or even a 0. (Personally, I think size 0 is what you should be after you’ve been dead a while.) Afterwards, I packed on 40 pounds eating the Post-Divorce Mrs. Fields Cookie and Chardonnay Depression Diet. Alas, I’ve been heifering, er, hovering around a size 16 ever since.
With no little trepidation, I decided to calculate my BRI. I feared my lack of a waist could skew my score given that the BRI is designed to be a “calculation of combining height and waist circumference measurements to evaluate the ‘roundness’ of the human body.” Did I need to be abused by yet another metric when I’m already pretty clear what the answer is using more low-tech methods? (It’s called a ‘mirror’.)
The BMI categorizes me as “Overweight.” (The category above that is a brutal “Obese” followed by an even more soul-crushing “Extremely Obese.”) As it turns out, the BRI is kinder. It concluded I have “above average body roundness, with a waist circumference larger than most people.” So a nicer way of saying, “Sorry, sweet pea. But you’re fat.” It politely suggests that I “consider consulting a doctor or nutritionist to develop an appropriate health improvement plan.”
Or maybe I can just do as I always do on January 1 and put “Lose weight!” at the top of my resolutions list and then lose the list. Works for me!
Meanwhile, sometimes I think this T-Rex’s body looks waaaay too familiar…
