NO MORE MISTER FAT GUY: Beautiful People Got Lots of Reasons

 

 

As I continue down this road of diminishment, buying into the notion that less of me is more, I can’t help feeling a bit conflicted about it all. Why should it be important for me (a relatively healthy, not terribly heavy middle-age married Dad) to lose those extra five or ten pounds? Is my wife complaining about it? No. Is the extra weight really creating a health risk? Probably not, although some might make the argument. So is this mostly just a case of middle-age vanity? A way to deal with the midlife blues? A sad attempt to recapture my long lost youth? Rather then going out and buying that sports car which I can ill afford, I’ve decided to go out and (hopefully) lose two or three inches off my waist?

 

But before I could answer any of these annoying questions I kept asking myself, I became distracted by something else I found of interest. You know those weight calculation things you find on the web that figures out that Body Mass Index (BMI) number I keep talking so much about? Well, they also tell you what percentile you’re in given your age, height, weight, and oh yeah, gender (male, by the way, in case I’ve never made that clear).

 

And so on the one hand, I’m considered overweight, still hovering just above the cut off line of 25 BMI (25.2 as I write this), but on the other hand I’m in the 36^th percentile; meaning, some 64 percent of male Americans my age are, in fact, even fatter than I am. Talk about conflicting reports. Perhaps I should just simply grade myself on a curve, and be quite happy with my fat grade of decidedly well above average (or maybe that’s below average?), and eat whatever I want, when I want.

 

Then again, this only emphasizes the point that many have been making for years: America is a fat nation and only getting fatter, as reflected in the new season of THE BIGGEST LOSER where the pairs competing against others just last night were the heaviest group the show, now in its ninth season, had ever seen. In other words, while being fat may be relative, it doesn't change the fat facts; if one is going to compare oneself to overweight people, then that just makes one (me) not as overweight as others, not necessarily thin.

 

And speaking of watching television (note the segue?), I was at the gym last night trudging through my usual 5k on the treadmill and watching CNN with my earphones plugged into the treadmill when I saw this piece about beautifulpeople.com. It’s a site that requires you to be beautiful in order to join. How does one decide this? Well, a beautiful member of the site has to first recommend you, and then you must get voted on by all the beautiful others, who collectively decide whether or not you’re beautiful enough to join the site. This from their website:

 

 

Turns out that after the holidays, however, more than a few of these beautiful people had packed on a few extra pounds, and when they posted photos of themselves to show how they'd let themselves go they were soon expelled from the site--five thousand of them, in fact. Out of site, out of mind? Tubby today, gone tomorrow?

 

A spokesman for the site said, "Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded." Wow....The good news, however, is that these roaming fatties can still lose those added pounds and then try and get reinstated onto the site; they can be voted back on, make their comeback. Be beautiful once more! It sure makes me feel all warm inside knowing that beautifulpeople.com can be so forgiving, welcoming the deserving ones back into their fold.