I'm in the mood for arguing and ranting about fat again.
Or telling someone that is
resistant to anesthesia to "stop being such a crybaby!".
I find the presumptousness of people surprising because of course if that's your experience then everyone else must experience things in
exactly the same way!
With the heritablity of weight in your average western population being around 70% that means that if you're of normal size and you see a very fat person walking down the street, that most (70%) of the difference between you and them is genetic. Knowing that there is a natural genetic variation in body size, why do we apply a one size fits all approach to health? Modest weight loss (10lbs) is very good for your health and entirely achievable for most of the population, we should be realistic about the amounts of weight loss we can expect in a genetically varied population. What use are BMI charts? They are damaging to self esteem especially for girls, from a guys perspective you might as well have an "ideal penis size" chart up on the wall for impressionable young kids to see.
To show the arbitrary nature of BMI consider that the "obesity epidemic" could be reversed in a few months by targeting the millions of people sitting just above the arbitrary obesity line and getting them to lose a few pounds to cross that line. So all of a sudden the obesity "rate" has dropped dramatically without anyone losing more than a 10 pounds. There would still be just as many fat people and just as many health problems, but
statistically it would look just beautiful as the "epidemic" would be "cured".
I have no doubt that in most populations around the world we are getting bigger, the whole distribution is shifting across, but the average changes in weight are modest (7-20lb) the public and doctors expect too much of fat people, losing (10lbs) is a realistic aim that would dramatically reduce health risks across the board. The obesity epidemic would be solved by turning very fat people into slightly less fat people but for some reason we insist that they turn into slim people, which is statistically very improbable (in other words idealistic nonsense).