So What's Your Plan?

The other morning I read an article from Reuters News Service titled ‘How Your Company Is Watching Your Waistline’. You should read this article then fold back to my blog entry ‘Body Fat; What is it? How much do I have? Can it be calculated? And the BMI Dog and Pony Show’

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/13/us-usa-healthcare-benefits-idUSBRE9AC0IM20131113

I Told You So! Since the AMA has listed obesity as a disease and uses something as arbitrary as BMI to determine the condition, your insurance company, contracted through your employer can now dictate higher rates for an undiagnosed condition; for not fitting within a statistical model. This means that your employer, to get a reasonable discount and hold insurance costs down (read this as maximizing profit), can penalize you. It would be illegal under Obamacare to charge you for a preexisting condition; however, not meeting a statistical model, there is no law against that. Kinda’ like legalized extortion. Who would have thought that the reward for hard work to gain muscle and trim the fat would be a higher insurance rate? And the burden of proof is on you to show that you are in control of that Last 10 Pounds.  

So at 5’9’’ and 180 pounds, I’m considered overweight. Yep, got me a BMI of 27.1, the model cut off for ‘normal’ is 25. I am officially overweight. I would have to lose 11 pounds to be considered ‘normal’. WOW!!!

Does the individual in this photo look overweight or obese? That’s me, I think have met the standard for looking normal, I see no indication of being overweight; do you?

Well, maybe that pony tail, but that’s another story.

This picture was time stamped, October 1^st, 2013. Three days later on the 4^th, at the World Gym in Taichung Taiwan, I weighed in on the Fat-O-Meter 2000 (InBody 220 Bio-Impedance Scanner); Weight 82 kg, Lean Mass 38.4 kg, Fat Mass 14.4 kg, Other Mass (bone and minerals) 29.3 kg. When you do the arithmetic, that’s 17.5% body fat. For a male, 17.5% body fat is at the upper end of the Fitness category. So how can one set of standards call out Fat and a second set say you’re Fit. And I guarantee, if you did a skin fold we would be way less than the 17.5% from the Impedance Scale. BMI; What a joke!!

And you should remember from my earlier blog entry, ‘Body Fat; What is it? How much do……..’ that if you’ve worked hard to look normal and more importantly, to be healthy, and you end up on the BMI hit list, you need to challenge the establishment, make them look you in the eye and say “you are diagnosed as being overfat”. Don’t stand for it; throw the burden of proof back to the medical and insurance establishment.

So what’s your plan? My plan is to stay on course with my weight training and diet, keep up running 6 out of 7 days a week, keep doing my homework on the fight against fat and challenge my doctor the next time he includes my BMI on any kind of medical report. Challenge everyone that discusses this metric, it misclassifies people that actually work hard to keep ahead of that Last 10 Pounds. 

MMJennings