Good News and Exasperation

First, the good news: I’ve been officially diagnosed! With the very thing I had already suspected, at that. I’m not happy that I’ll have to live with fibromyalgia for the rest of my life, but it’s great to finally know what’s wrong. Also, I can work on getting better now – which is not to say that I hadn’t already attempted to do that before, but I kept getting worse instead for some reason.

Since my new medication makes me very tired and kills my ability to articulate myself sometimes, I just want to say this one thing:

Sometimes I wish there was a way to make all of humanity permanently thin at once (or at least over the course of no more than a few years), so that we could finally observe whether disease rates would really drop as dramatically as people seem to think these days – or not. My personal guess is that nothing, or nearly nothing would change, and that formerly fat people would still have the same risks as before … but I’m tired of all this guesswork. I … excuse me, articulation. Ahem.

BMI, WHR … What’s Next?

I saw an interesting comment at Eat A Cheeseburger today:

Also, the waist-to-hip thing isn’t exactly clear cut. When I lost a lot of weight in the spring, my waist-to-hip ration got higher. My fat is stored on my hips, so if I lose it, my hips get smaller but my waist doesn’t and the ratio goes up.

Are doctors and scientists aware of this phenomenon?

I just went into the bedroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a while … to figure out where my waist is. As I recently discovered, the thinnest part of my torso is and has always been the space directly below my boobs. Technically, I could think of that as my “waist” … but I doubt it’s where you’re supposed to measure.

My belly has been stretched out by pregnancy so that it now looks like a deflated balloon.  I can assure you that this makes for a significant difference in the shape of my waist – but how is this redistribution of mass supposed to affect my health? It’s the same stuff in the same general area, it has only moved around a bit. And it feels emptier. Perhaps I should suck my stomach in during the measuring progress, ha.

Which brings me to the next question: What about people with skin folds? Where do they measure? Or are they excluded from the whole WHR thing by default because it’s obvious they’re too fat one way or another?

Whoever said the BMI was flawed deserves a cookie. Those who are now saying that the WHR makes more sense apparently don’t.