7. Beyond BMI: Rethinking Health, Weight, and What Truly Nourishes Us

In this eye-opening and deeply compassionate episode of Nourished, Dr. Anikó dismantles the myths surrounding BMI (Body Mass Index) and challenges us to stop measuring our health solely by a number. Drawing on her expertise as a double board-certified Integrative Pediatrician and Postpartum Specialist, she explores the flawed origins of BMI, how it has been misapplied across populations, and why it often fails to reflect true wellness especially for women, people of color, and those in larger bodies.

With both clinical wisdom and personal insight, Dr. Anikó invites listeners to reframe their relationship with their bodies, replacing shame and rigidity with love, trust, and a more holistic definition of health. Whether you’ve been told your BMI is too high or too low or have internalized harmful messages about weight this episode is a powerful reminder: your body is not a problem to fix, but a home to honor.

Episode Highlights:

• The surprising and non-medical history behind BMI
• Why BMI fails women, non-white populations, and individuals in larger bodies
• How the insurance industry shaped our modern idea of “ideal weight”
• When BMI can be helpful and when it causes harm
• The dangers of equating thinness with health
• How to reconnect with your body’s wisdom and honor its cycles
• Why joy, intuition, and love are essential parts of nourishment

If you've ever been told or thought your weight determines your worth or questioned how to nourish your body without shameful restriction this episode offers clarity, empowerment, and a new path forward rooted in wholeness.

Connect with Dr. Anikó:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.aniko/

Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Anikó: [00:00:00] Hi y'all. Today I wanted to talk about the way that we conceptualize our bodies and our health, and because of how we were raised and what the world told us, a lot of us talk a lot about our weight 

A lot of us talk about BMI, which is Body Mass Index, and BMI is not a great predictor for overall health or future [00:01:00] health for a lot of people. And in this episode, I wanted to explore why that is. And also to invite everybody to start to really love and appreciate our bodies as we are, because our bodies are not just this reflection of our health, right?

They are actually our connection to our present moments. They are the way that we live our lives. So when we talk about being healthy and what that means to us, for most people it means being able to do what you love to do in life, being able to have all the experiences that you want to have, being able to take a hike, participate in sports, go to a concert.

Dance with your child at their wedding. So all of [00:02:00] us have different reasons that we want to stay healthy, but they all converge around what brings us joy. And so often in our efforts to try to become healthier, we end up starting a little bit of a battle with our bodies. We end up. shaming ourselves for wanting to eat the foods that we have for wanting to rest when we should be exercising.

And I'd like to spend some time in this episode talking about how we all go through cycles and how our body is different every single day. And for women, particularly women who are menstruating. That's especially true. Our whole lives are cycles, and so trying to force your body into this system of eating and exercise and discipline can [00:03:00] sometimes be harmful.

And I say this knowing that I. I have been a dancer at times. I've been an athlete, and I love discipline. I think it is really powerful. It's a powerful tool that we can use to learn skills. And to grow. I see it often used in ways that end up harming people,

and that happens when we override our body signals. For rest, for nutrition, just for something different. When we try to impose some different philosophy on our bodies, instead of taking the time to listen to ourselves and try to discover what it is that we need and what it is, that would be truly good for us because sometimes.

When we're trying to quote get healthy, we sometimes do things that aren't that good for us. And this is [00:04:00] especially true for larger bodied folks, people who were just born with larger bodies and can be absolutely healthy in larger bodies. And this is where the question of BMI kind of comes into play and where I think a little bit of history of BMI can be helpful.

So the equation for BMI Boss met body mass index, I guess I just wanna call it Boss Maddie Index. that's what it can be today. Anyway, the equation for BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by her height squared, and the equation was developed. By a Belgian statistician.

He was also a mathematician and an astronomer, and he really wanted to establish the characteristics of the normal man, quote unquote, [00:05:00] and his name was Adolf Kele. I'm not actually sure how to pronounce that. 

and he developed this using data from several hundred Belgian men. So it was all Belgian men in the mid 18 hundreds. So that's the data that was used to develop. The equation for BMI Body Mass Index. I got it.

And then by the early 19 hundreds. The vice President of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who is also a statistician, was looking for a way to classify people who were covered by Metropolitan Life Insurance, who had higher risk of becoming ill and dying. And so they were noticing that they were getting a lot of claims from folks who were heavier.

So this vice president who is named Louis Dublin. Decided he [00:06:00] wanted to look at the height and weight of all their clients, and obviously this is a huge amount of data, so he classified people into small frame, medium frame, and large frame. Depending on what their weight was at a given height, 

The middle third was medium, and the upper third was large. And then the average weights of those thirds were then termed ideal weights. So anyone who was 20 to 25% of the ideal weight was underweight. Anyone who was 70 to a hundred percent of the ideal weight was considered obese. And anyone in the middle there.

So between 25 and 70% of the ideal weight was considered normal weight. You may note that neither of the people that we're talking about so far were actually physicians, and no one is really looking at this for health promoting [00:07:00] behavior, right? 

He was just sort of interested in the weight distribution in human beings. He wasn't connecting it to health outcomes. And then Metropolitan Life Insurance isn't really looking at it on an individual level. We're not saying, Hey, this guy is, you know, this height and weight. What's his plan for having good health?

He's just saying people in the higher third. Are having more claims. And so he's looking at it from a purely monetary standpoint. That to me, is my first red flag about it. Right. So the next piece of this is a man named Ansel Keys, and he was a physiologist. And he was trying to figure out which formula best measured obesity and life expectancy.

And he found that Kit Delay's formula, which was weak divided by height squared, [00:08:00] turned out to be the most reliable for that. And Ansel Keys was the one who coined the term Body mass index, or BMI. and the way that he found out that it was body mass index that ended up correlating best with obesity and life expectancy was that he studied a bunch of different groups of people.

Most of whom were not minorities, so most of whom were white, all of whom were men. They did not study any women in any of this. And it led to people in the medical community, including the research community to start to use BMI and to use it on larger studies to study the population.

And it can be helpful in certain population studies, especially when we're studying white men and non-white, non-male people have historically been very underrepresented in medical research, and that's a [00:09:00] really big problem because how a drug works. you know, healthy BMI is not necessarily going to be the same in all genders, in all ethnicities.

So now we're really running up against the realities of BMI, which is that they can be helpful on a population level with certain populations, but they aren't always that helpful and in fact can be really harmful. For people on an individual level. So on one hand, if people are told, well, you are not healthy.

This is your BMI, but meanwhile, you are active, you are eating in a way that is balanced and nourishing. You are doing a lot of mind body work. So all of these different pillars of health, you can absolutely be healthy at virtually any size. It really depends on how you are living and how you are taking care of yourself.

And when we use these [00:10:00] BMI cutoffs, sometimes people, especially larger body people are told to start dieting in ways that are very, very, very unhealthy to the point of really representing more disordered eating than balanced approaches to eating. 

there was a small amount of data in ansel's, studies that did come from non-white people, but the majority was white men, sometimes, A BMI that we consider normal or healthy. People are already pre-diabetic. Or have risk for cardiovascular disease. So it also happens on that end of the spectrum as well, that because people have a good BMI, we are underestimating their risk.

And this is particularly true in Asian and South Asian populations. I experienced this personally in my life with two people who, One person who is Asian, and one person who is South [00:11:00] Asian, both of whom have normal bmi, both of whom are active, and when they got lab work done, both of them were shown to be pre-diabetic and both of them have handled it with changing how they're eating and shifting their exercise a little bit as well.

their lifestyle was pretty health promoting. But it just goes to show that if all we're looking at is BMI, we are going to do some harm because we're going to create problems for people who don't have any problems. And we're also going to miss issues for people who need some attention.

So, BMI can be a useful. Like I said, useful on a population level. It can be useful as part of a bigger picture, but we're, when we're talking about estimating risk, where you hold your body fat is not irrelevant. So visceral fat in the abdomen has been [00:12:00] shown to be a lot more related to poor health outcomes than.

subcutaneous fat, so that would be sort of holding it in your hips and thighs and buttocks. And actually subcutaneous fat, especially in women, has been associated with positive health outcomes. So we can't just reduce ourselves to these numbers. Again, when we have a big population, we can't individually interview every single person.

It can be helpful to. See health trends, but again, when we're using norms that are coming from white men. We need to redo those norms, right? So if we wanna keep using BMI, I don't know that we need to, but if we wanted to, if we wanted it to be a meaningful representation of something right, then we would need to redo it in different populations, different ethnicities, different genders, different times of life.

there's so much more nuance, and when we eliminate the [00:13:00] nuance and try to make health really algorithmic, there's a place for it on a population level. There's a place for it in terms of doing testing and that kind of thing. But when we're trying to address an individual's health. It's so much bigger than that.

It's so much bigger than weight. you can be healthy at virtually any size, and you can be unhealthy at virtually any size as well. So this fixation on a weight to me, especially growing up in the eighties and nineties and having weight be such a, I mean, it still is, but I just remember it being such a.

Such a marker of health and such a marker of, you know, social capital. You know, you want it to look like a certain person and there was no even acknowledgement of the fact that every single person's body is different and every single person's body is beautiful 'cause it's your body. [00:14:00] So I hope this episode has.

Maybe started some conversations within you about how you care for your body, how you love your body, how you see your body. Do you see it as this wonderful vessel? And do you see it as you, do you see it as how you live your life and is your motivation for taking care of your body so that you can live?

A vibrant life so you can connect with the people and the places and the things and the experiences that bring you joy because that is what is going to bring you to a place of real vitality if we're doing it from a place of shame or wanting to be some other way or somebody else.

It doesn't feel the same, and the motivation isn't the same. It doesn't last in the same way. And when we do it, it doesn't feel nourishing. But when we do it from a place of love for ourselves and love for our [00:15:00] life, and love for our bodies, and also a knowledge that we are not supposed to look or be like anybody else.

You are supposed to look like and be yourself, and you are beautiful. And I hope, honestly, that is the big takeaway from this podcast episode that you are beautiful and valuable and amazing as you are, and that I hope that you love your body. And that you take care of yourself from a place of love because that is really being nourished.

Thanks so much for being here y'all.

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