Don’t do it. (Picture: Getty Images)

Like most women, I have a complicated relationship with my weight.

(Trigger warning: eating disorders)

I struggled with bulimia as a teenager. I’ve swung between crying while eating French Fancies to punish myself with food, and passing out on my bedroom floor because I was determined to live off 400 calories a day.

Is the Foreo UFO 2 90-second mask tool worth the faff?

So how did I get this way?


It’s a long list. I’m a middle class, academic girl who went to a single-sex school, so that’s always a head start when it comes to eating disorders.

I work in a profession where people constantly call me fat and ugly when they disagree with my writing, which definitely doesn’t help.



But one of the biggest factors in my on-going battle against self-loathing is a measure that I discovered as a teenager.

Until my mid-teens, I was happy-ish with my body. I knew I wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t big. I was normal. Medium sized. And then, in biology, we were taught how to work out our BMI.

I don’t know how anyone thought that was a responsible thing to get a group of teenage girls to do, but we did it. And I was, apparently, overweight.

Me aged 17, technically ‘overweight.’

Overweight. It was like I’d had a label slapped on my forehead, a label that meant I was lazy and ugly and unhealthy.

I think the idea of BMI, which has often been called a crude or inaccurate measure by experts, is to guide people about how to be ‘healthy’. That is the exact opposite of what it achieved.

My obsession with BMI turned into an obsessive diet, a punishing workout regime and a returning to my old bulimic ways.

I lost 10lb in a matter of weeks. But then, just before I took my A-Levels, I ate a Jaffa Cake.

A Jaffa Cake should not register as a significant moment in your life. It is ridiculous that I was so obsessed with my body that I still remember the feeling of eating the Jaffa Cake. But I do.

And one became a packet. It was followed by a handful of Party Rings. Then a package of cheese. I crammed enough food to feed a children’s birthday party into my mouth, desperately trying to end the hunger of the last few weeks.

Me, aged 17 with an ‘overweight’ BMI.

What people don’t seem to realise is that you can’t lose weight if you hate yourself. Or at least, you can’t keep it off.

When you hate yourself you punish yourself – you don’t believe you deserve to be treated well and looked after. Making yummy, nutritious food and genuinely enjoying workouts? Those are things that people who like themselves do.

I don’t believe a BMI can make people like themselves. It makes people feel guilty or ashamed. It puts human bodies, which exist on a scale, into four block categories – underweight, ‘healthy’, overweight and obese.



Even the categories are judgmental. ‘Healthy’ sits smugly in the middle, cheerfully dictating that you’re not allowed to be healthy if you don’t fit into the special little band.

How much do most of us even know about this magical measurement that apparently will tell us how ‘healthy’ we are?

18, and still ‘overweight’.

According to the International Journal of Obesity BMI is ‘an indirect measure of body fat that doesn’t take into account important details about age, sex, bone structure, and fat distribution.’

BMI was invited in the 1800’s in an attempt to quantify an ‘ideal man.’ It was left alone for nearly two hundred years when a researcher named Ancel Keyes decided that while crude, BMI was a decent-ish metric for body fat.

And apparently, despite the fact that we’ve since invented robots and Netflix, there’s been no push to create a better or more accurate way to measure body fat.

It’s not just the upper end of the weight scale where BMI fails people, either. One woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me that suffered from serious anorexia as a teenager was denied medical help because her BMI was ‘healthy’.

She was covered in fur, she couldn’t stop shivering, and she was bruised from sitting down. But because she was five foot tall, it apparently didn’t matter that she weighed under six stone. Her BMI was in the ‘healthy’ range. So she was ‘healthy’.

Aged 17 and, again, apparently overweight.

Even when I felt good about myself, when I zipped up a pair of size 12 jeans or fit into something that belonged to one of my skinny friends, there was still a voice in the back of my head telling me that I was overweight, because an equation said so. A mathematical formula had decided that I was the fat friend.


Before BMI was in my life, I was growing into a happy, healthy, totally normal adult woman. And then we were bombarded with messages about BMI and the horrors of fatness.

The intention of alerting me to my BMI was, I think, ‘health’. And maybe that would work if we as a society weren’t so terrified of fatness. But because of the way we see body fat, my BMI wasn’t a gentle reminder to do more running, it was confidence shattering klaxon.

There is no doubt in my mind that I would be lighter today if I had never heard the letters BMI.

When I’ve railed against BMI I’ve sometimes been told that it’s ‘necessary’ – that it ‘teaches people’ that they are overweight. I can only assume that those people have no idea what it’s like to be overweight. Putting aside the ignorance that comes from assuming that being overweight and being unhealthy are the same thing (we’ll talk about that another day).

An overweight person doesn’t need a crudely worked out number to tell them that they are carrying extra fat. They know it. They can see themselves, they know how much they eat. God knows they’re aware of how they are treated in the street and how hard it is to buy clothes. An anonymous friend told me, ‘BMI is just another way for medical practitioners to write off every issue as a side effect of your weight. When I go to the doctor, they don’t even listen to me. They just take one look and tell me about my BMI.’

Me now, still (probably) overweight according to my BMI, but refusing to give a f*ck

These days, not far off a decade later, I am still technically overweight. I am (like most people) heavier than I was at sixteen.


I also train at one of London’s toughest boot camps, can run at nine miles an hour on an incline and lift heavy weights for funsies. I am fit. And while I drink and smoke too much to be able to honestly call myself healthy, my weight is the last thing that’s wrong with my body.

My wedding is coming up in July, and I’m open about the fact that I’m trying to lose weight for it. But this time, it’s different. I don’t weigh myself, and I never will again. I’m interested in my fitness, my strength and how my clothes fit.

I no longer use numbers to torture myself with. I’m changing my body because I love it, not because I hate it.

If your BMI is overweight, please don’t let it crush you. I truly believe it is a crude measure. It’s not a good representation of your health, and it doesn’t take extremes of height or having muscle density into account. Your BMI doesn’t know how healthy you are, only how much you weigh.

It also doesn’t know if you’re kind or funny or creative or determined. It’s literally just a number.

MORE: Are unrealistic goals the secret to weight loss?

MORE: This Instagram fitness blogger is illustrating the downside to losing weight

Advertisement Advertisement