On Being A Health Nut

One of my newest toys is a $140 Fitbit. As an active person, I’m pretty in love with the fact that I can use my fitbit to help me keep accountable for my workouts, since I usually get a little lazy towards the end. Yet the cheapskate in me is still asking, “You already walk 10,000 steps a day AND you workout six days a week. Did you really have to buy this?”

My parents voiced aloud something similar: “You’re already thin. Why do you want to lose weight?”

But me buying the Fitbit wasn't about losing pounds. It was part of me trying to be healthy in a healthy way.

Over on the Lil Policy Bunny Blog, she made herself open as she addressed her past eating disorder as part of a larger conversation about how easy it can be for body parts-such as cleavage-can be desirable and not desirable like fashion trends. I mentioned on her post that while I never had an eating disorder, I was dangerously close to having one.

One cannot live in Los Angeles and be active on social media channels without getting at least a little caught up in the ideal of a healthy lifestyle. There are god knows how many diets out there and god knows how many fitness articles/blogs/gurus that give conflicting advice. And it really doesn’t help when I feel like most of my classmates can just pay their student debt with part-time modeling gigs.

These tiny aspects of my surroundings were built into my subconscious on the day I couldn’t get through a high-intensity Zumba class despite the fact that my 60-year-old mother didn’t even need a break. After that day I obsessed over my diet, exercised to the point where I was doing damage to my body, and had a strong sense of failure if my weight wasn’t going down a few ounces every day.

My goal was to be healthy and to be as physically fit as possible...but I mistook that in order to reach my healthiest state of being, I needed to be thin.

But healthy is actually NOT always the equivalent of thin. Time addressed this about two years ago and used an example of a 19-year-old woman who was 5’3 and 117 pounds. While this kind of physique would be viewed as healthy by many people, the woman was actually diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes when she was 16. And, as the article went on to discuss, people who are naturally thin can still be obese.

People like this have what Italian researchers from the University of Tor Vergata termed Normal Weight Obesity Syndrome. While BMI is the most-used indicator of health, it does not indicate how much lean muscle mass a person has; much like a person’s weight, BMI doesn’t tell the whole story.

I know I’ve leaned on Youtube way too much for my blogs, but I can’t resist slipping this video in where Buzzfeed staff learned something interesting about how different BMI can look:

So just like how media’s portrayal of beauty needs to stop valuing skinniness, media’s portrayal of healthiness needs to send a message, especially to women, that being skinny is NOT the same as being healthy.

As more conversations on body positivity and anecdotes of survivors of eating disorders become even more accessible via workshops and the Internet, hopefully future generations will be able to subscribe to better views on physical health. I’m just happy that as I use my Fitbit for my workouts, I’m finally focusing on my physical abilities as my main indicator of my health rather than a number on a scale.