Although I have frequent meetings and commitments out of the house, I have found working from home to be even more sedentary than working at an office. I don’t hustle around to other peoples’ cubes or meet colleagues for lunch across campus. I just sit. And write. And sit some more. While writing. So since the day I became self-employed, I’ve made sure to carve out some time for exercise each day. My preference is to take a brisk walk around my neighborhood while listening to podcasts or books.
The first time I set foot in a gym – voluntarily anyway – was in June of 2000. I was 23 years old, and had never done any regular fitness activities or sports in my life. I felt awkward and out of place, spent loads of energy worrying about how I looked and how everyone else looked, and enjoyed my gym time approximately not at all.
After several years, a lot of figure fluctuations, and the launch of this blog, I began to relax a bit. I was less worried and more contemplative. I did a lot of thinking about body image and fitness, self-scrutiny and confidence as I observed my fellow gym-goers. But I still did a lot of comparison. More than I’d like to admit, in fact. And a fair amount of judging, too, especially about how workout clothing fit and who was wearing full makeup and how much abdomen was showing. I had calmed some of my self-criticism, but seemingly amped up the cattiness.
Reader Samantha dropped me an e-mail asking about my opinions of BMI. She is the 35-year-old mother of a 5-month-old infant, recently went in for a check-up, and was told that she was overweight based on the current BMI scale. Her own feelings about what constituted a healthy weight for her body were shattered when she was informed that she needed to be 20 pounds lighter than her own typical weight in order to fall within the “normal” range. And she was frustrated.
I can completely relate to her frustration. Over the past few years, I’ve been having all sorts of digestive and reproductive health problems. None of the docs have had any idea what was up, despite round after round of tests. At some point in there, a blood test came back that had me right on the border of being pre-diabetic. Still nowhere close to being actually diabetic, and that test turned out to be an anomaly. Yet I was told that I should probably lose five pounds to kick me back into the “normal” BMI range. And told this with zero inquiry into my eating or exercise habits. It was all I could do not to laugh in the doc’s face. Really? REALLY? I’m not diabetic, there’s no discernible link between my health problems and my weight, I’m five pounds over “normal,” and you’re still gonna harp on BMI right now?
Sally McGraw is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer, blogger, and editor.
