Seriously? Fifteen pounds? How sad is it that our society is so sensitized to the thinness ideal that this woman’s friends and colleagues so vehemently observed a mere 15 lb. weight change? I understand that, as a percentage, it like would have been more obvious on her than it would on me, but seriously. Fifteen pounds?

I was hospitalized 10 years ago after contracting a particularly nasty virus that pretty much eliminated my blood platelets. From the time I started feeling sick until I went into the hospital, I had lost 15 pounds. The admitting nurse noted this and said, “Wow! You’ve lost 15 lbs. in a week!” She couldn’t contain her excitement. I — feeling and looking like death (and precious near it) — responded, “give me back my ability to clot, and I’ll take those 15 lbs. back in a heartbeat. I’d rather be fat and healthy.” (Not that losing those 15 lbs. made me thin, by any stretch of the imagination!)

I think we humans oversimplify everything, not just weight (fat=unhealthy, thin=healthy). People want to see thin people so they can be reassured that all is right with the world, the same way they want to see married heterosexual couples. It doesn’t matter that there may be domestic abuse or infidelity or financial ruin — if a man is married to a woman, then that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that couple is therefore acceptable. Anything that deviates outside that formula (singlehood especially past a certain age, gay marriage, even childless hetero marriage, etc.) is suspect.

Tangent alert! Sorry. It’s just that, the more I read about people’s experiences with fat hatred, the more I think that fat activism must be as much about acceptance in general as it is dispelling misinformation about body size and teaching people to assert their rights as human beings, fat or otherwise.

Yep. I’m working (not very hard) to get back to my Happy Weight, which would give me a BMI of 22. My female ancestors herded sheep over mountains while carrying firewood on their backs — we are not built small. Short, but not small.

Oh, and I was slightly incorrect — according to the CDC, unhealthy weight at the low end of the BMI scale starts at 18.5, not 17.

You don’t even have to go down that far. I went from a BMI of 21 to a BMI of 20 over the course of about a year, due to thyroid problems & depression–a loss of about ten pounds–and it messed with my bone density (I’m 19!) and had my gynecologist seriously freaked out. BMI is a flawed mechanism for measuring health, of course, but it’s given a range to account for different body types, and anyone who’s seen my shoulders, ribs, and hips knows I was not meant to be at the lower end of the healthy range. Healthy for someone of, I dunno, Korean descent (my tiny roommate who is probably at a perfect weight for herself) is not necessarily healthy for someone of Mediterranean stock (me).

And, yes, I did get people who didn’t understand why I was unhappy about losing weight, or in one especially creepy instance complimented me on getting in shape sine he’d last seen me (when I’d had, remember, a BMI of 21–and when my hands didn’t look like they were about to fall off my wrists). Of course I was in terrible shape–I wasn’t exercising, I was depressed, my bone density was low, I was probably somewhat malnourished (still probably am honestly). But I was “skinny” so it was awesome! BLEH, I say.

I think that’s part of the problem — we have this idea that anorexia isn’t dangerous until the person gets down to 60 pounds, but it is. Just being underweight (a BMI of 17 or less) is unhealthy in and of itself and can have long-term health consequences.

I do think that this is a big media center problem to a certain extent — it’s most acute in places like New York and Los Angeles, and less acute (though still a problem) the further out you go. I remember going to Las Vegas with a group of friends about 10 years ago. We went to a nightclub (I think it was The Beach) and one of my friends was absolutely swarmed by guys. It was disconcerting to her because though she’s very pretty, she’s about 50 pounds overweight and in Los Angeles, she could barely get guys to acknowledge her existence. But in Vegas, where you have people congregating from all over the country, her weight was not nearly as big a deal.

She’s since had the gall bladder removed, she’s gained most of the weight back and is really cheerful again. Some of her colleagues still wonder what happened.

It was a pretty relaxed environment. The crowd of ultra-hip were raptly listening to a young woman describe how she went camping, drank some stream water, and got a parasite, and that’s why she’s lost so much weight. “Look!” she said to the throngs of guys barely containing their drool, “you can count my vertebrae!” She actually lifted the back of her shirt to show off her skeleton. She was talking about how difficult (not really) it was having a parasite, and that she wrote a song about her parasite.

Within a month, I’d moved to Philly.