Skinny ≠ Healthy

I’ve been pretty skinny my entire life.  I’m not so thin that I got teased for lack of a posterior, but skinny enough to earn scolding from older relatives.  I’d say it’s mostly genetic – as long as I stay at least moderately active I burn calories pretty fast. 

But my light weight isn’t doing much to lower my blood pressure.

I’m getting pretty damn tired of the notion that one guarantees the other, or that you have to be a pencil thin, kale-centric, Barre-bunny to be fit.  As far as I am concerned, a skinny objective is often distinct from a health objective.  Anorexics are skinny.  Then you have Orthorexics – for whom the obsession to “eat clean” for health reasons also becomes a skinny objective.  However, society still wants to judge health by lack of dimension.  Remember how this picture of the First Lady made some folks cry conspiracy?  How could anyone who’d crammed healthy eating and exercise propaganda down our throats have a profile like that?  Or the attempts to shame Gabby and Simone?  Or Kate and so many others?  I could cite many more examples but instead I direct you to Ebony's glorious cover and we move on.

Now, I am not going to assert that if someone is suffering from heart disease, or diabetes, or hypertension, that getting rid of extra weight isn’t proven to help. BUT, again, I’m pocket-sized and I still have high blood pressure.

So I assert that the only key to health isn't size.   It’s lifestyle.  Making changes like eating cleaner food, cutting back on saturated fats, making nutrition the central focus of your diet, staying physically active, and hugging at least one person every day - just to name a few things – that’s how to measure health. 

And if you can dance like Beyonce, flip like Simone, dominate like Venus and Serena, vamp like Gabe, and strut like Leslie, you ARE the model of health.