I am no different

....than many other women. I succumb to media influences, too. I tried two different topics for this post before settling on the topic of body image. I had just come from a site with a slide show depicting images of women (and one man and one cat!!) and what their BMI's were (not the actual number, but the category: normal, overweight, etc.). Here it is:

http://kateharding.net/bmi-illustrated/

It was totally ridiculous! I would never guess that many of the individuals were categorized by the BMI as being "overweight" or "obese", or whatever other category they fit into. I guess that is exactly the point: how can we categorize someone, and their health, by looking at them???



According to the index, I am very close to being "overweight". A couple of pounds away. And while I have my moments, thinking about losing weight, annoyingly staring and poking at my soft tummy, I do not feel as though my weight is impacting my health. Embarrassingly, it's all about aesthetics when I do think about it. How I look in the mirror. Sad.

Why do we do this to ourselves? How does it help me, my confidence, to judge myself on something so arbitrary? I know that if I gained a lot of weight, it would not be helpful to my ankle, which hurts a lot when weight is placed on it. But come on, how much weight would I need to lose for my ankle not to hurt? An amount that would be unhealthy for the rest of me, that's for sure.

I'm not sure how to finish this post, or what conclusion to come to. I certainly don't feel like this all the time, but it does go to show you that anyone, no matter how confident and comfortable one is, can have times where they question themselves. Well, I do feel a bit better than when I started to write this post yesterday :)

In other news, I just joined BlogHer! Yay!! I'm actually doing something that I intended to do: start a blog to meet some folks in the same boat as me :)