I miss Disturbing Brew. Please come back. I’m one who felt your perspective balanced a lot of the issues in the movement that make me feel wobbly. I tried looking for an email address for you, but no dice. Maybe I looked in the wrong places. I hope a public plea doesn’t offend you. Just trying this to see if you’d at least get a pingback. If you aren’t planning on resuming that particular blog, would you consider archiving it? I’m sad at the thought of losing access to a lot of ideas that felt like guiding lights.

Best to you, Kell.

So Kate Harding’s post last week about an article on how fat people don’t set an ideal weight that falls in the normal BMI category reminded me of the first goal weight I ever set for myself. I had gotten fat around age 7 or 8. I had already accompanied my mom to a Weight Watchers meeting where I made a very big deal about losing half a pound. So I can’t really blame her for not being able to help me realize I was fine the way I was. She was mildly overweight as a teen, but made to feel like a blimp. To this day, she avoids looking in mirrors.

Unfortunately, I ended up learning from pop culture what I “should” weigh. And I believed this was a normal weight until I was around 26 years old. I wanted to weigh 95 pounds. Why? Because that’s what the sisters on “Double Trouble” weighed. Of all the episodes I watched and all the things featured in them, what’s stuck after two decades? Ninety-five pounds.

Sounds really stupid, doesn’t it? But where are we supposed to learn this stuff? Who will tell us we should weigh what we weigh … aim to maintain our natural weight without screwing it up by dieting? Our moms have been through the same anti-fat upbringing.  BMI tables are useless.

Kate’s beautifully illustrated BMI Project aptly shows how simplified the BMI standards are. They are also ludicrously arbitrary. I’m planning a future post that either summarizes or excerpts the history of the BMI tables from Glenn Gaesser’s Big Fat Lies, but if you don’t want to wait, then definitely give the book a try. Flipping a coin would be a less arbitrary way of determining one’s so-called “ideal” weight.

Oddly enough, it was another pop culture moment that enabled me to understand that women are “allowed” to weigh more than 100 pounds or even 125 pounds. A very normal looking contestant on a reality show who could not be described as too thin or even a little bit plump revealed her weight to be 140 pounds.

Now, I know that that is still a desirable weight for many, but it was 45 pounds over what I’d subscribed to as the ideal weight for a number of years. It was a revelation to me. The fat acceptance movement continues to open my eyes even wider.