The great thing about growing older is that I no longer care, at all, about my weight.
In fact, I don’t give a flash-frozen rat’s ass about it, as my late journalism buddy David Holwerk would say.
I am 5 feet, 3 inches tall - that’s 160 cm for those of you enlightened ones who use the sensible metric system - and I weigh about 158 pounds, or a little over 71 kilograms.
No matter what diet I have gone on, I have bounced around between 150-158 pounds for close to 20 years.
It doesn’t appear to matter that I walk an average of five miles a day, that I regularly practice Shaolin Kempo karate (I am a brown belt), that I don’t smoke and I don’t drink, or that I eat organic vegetables that my husband grows. I have given up drinking my beloved Diet Coke and am down to one cup of coffee a day in favor of green tea. My blood pressure is perfect; my cholesterol is under control.
During the isolation of the pandemic lockdown, when I was walking up to nine miles a day for my own mental health, I got down to 152. But even at that, every chart I ever looked at said I was overweight.
Then, there is the BMI, or Body Mass Index.
My fancy electronic bathroom scale, when I choose to step on it, flashes my BMI of 28. BMI is a formula that is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared to come up with a magic number that in my case - surprise - also says I am overweight.
And just in case I forget: Whenever I visit the doctor, the reams of paper I receive as I am exiting prints my weight and BMI.
It’s ridiculous.
For one, Body Mass Index was invented by a Belgian mathematician in 1830 named Adolphe Quetelet, who studied human characteristics of white males. (Good for you, Adolphe, but what does this have to do with ME?)
Although BMI has been used for decades, the medical establishment is beginning to see its obvious limits. Last year the American Medical Association voted to recommend that doctors not rely upon BMI in assessing patient health.
And yet, there it is, on my medical chart, this absurd equation from the 19th century.
I used to take all this a lot more seriously than I do now. No longer. Age will do that to you, and thank God for that.
What does a 19th century equation - the BMI - have to do with me?
But a lifetime of body shaming from corporate interests that urge us to get thin to fatten their bottom line has left me cynical. I get angry about what unhealthy attitudes about weight have done to whole generations of people, particularly women.
Something happened last year that really drove this point home for me.
I had an acquaintance who announced on Facebook that she had an incurable disease. Everything her doctors tried to rein in her cancer failed, she wrote. "It's been real, kids. Thanks for the ride.”
After I read her message, I got in touch. We began to communicate more than we had in years.
Judith - not her real name - was smart, kind and a good writer. She was always a little plump.
As we messaged back and forth, she told me that she came from a family of very thin and fashionable women. Her family’s business was the women’s apparel industry. She wrote that it was essential among her relatives to look fabulous in clothes. The family put a premium on being fashionably thin.
The upside to her medical crisis was that for the first time in decades she was at the weight that would have earned her approval, even congratulations from previously disapproving relatives. After years of feeling like a lesser person because of her weight, Judith felt really good about the way she looked, at around 110 pounds.
I am glad that Judith found some peace about this issue at the end. But this is the damage that our body-shaming, toxic culture can do: that it could take a terminal disease to finally make a person feel free of the burden of judgment about weight.
I realized then that most of my life I was rarely satisfied with my weight, or how I looked, ever, even when I looked great. There was always the feeling in the back of my mind that I wasn’t thin enough, wasn’t fit enough, and always had some gap to fill.
Until became a Woman of a Certain Age, that is, and more readily could see this kind of insanity for what it really is: Complete, unadulterated crap.
Judith did not live to see New Year’s Day. My faith tells me that she is in a better place.
But I will always be a little haunted by how comforted she was at the end about how thin she had become, a reflection of the way in which the issue of weight troubled her during her lifetime.
We shouldn’t have to be dying in order to finally feel OK about who we are.
I'm not overweight, but pant trying to keep up with you! Aging provides the gift of perspective. I haven't shed pounds. But I've shed taking anything personally. I no longer get rattled by other people's antics. It's their stuff, not mine. This is a comforting chapter in life.
I myself am 5’3” and just peak in at 158.5 lbs. great BP & Cholesterol! And just like you I don’t care anymore! This is my God given adult weight I’ve been between this and 164.5 for 30+ years . My mother’s weight too. I compare myself to the deer that roam around our yard searching of little scrap of sustenance that they can find. They all are the same height and weight (so it seems) no matter what they eat. Now do I wish my stomach was a little flatter Yes so so be it. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which I blame on the diet food I used to eat and the preservatives in them for all the years I was trying to lose weight that never came off! So now I eat a more anti inflammatory diet but also potato chips and ice cream and it’s freeing!