Event 5: What's wrong with fat?

Last Friday I attended the event “What’s Wrong With Fat” Seminar sponsored by the UCLA Department of Sociology. At this event, three speakers from different departments of UCLA critiqued the book “ What’s Wrong With Fat”.

Professor Abigail Saguy, the author of the book, argued that the obesity epidemic is largely due to how media, politics and medical science frames it. Nowadays the media have simply claimed that being skinny is much better than being fat without explaining what the real problem. As the result, more and more people from all ages are very concerned about their physical shapes and weight number. As we discussed during the week of medical and art, some people even tried liposuction to get lean. For example, BMI is considered as an important index for people’s health. However, BMI higher than 30 doesn’t mean that you’re unhealthy. BMI is simply calculated by dividing the weight in kg by square of people’s health. It tells you nothing about your body composition. The interesting fact is that many professional bodybuilding athletes and amateur bodybuilders have the BMI higher than 30. Obviously they have high BMI because of more lean muscle and actually BMI has been never an accurate measure of obesity.

Weight scale tells you nothing either. A more accurate index is the fat percentage. It tells more about your body composition and how much of your weight are due to fat. Because media constantly report that fatness is unhealthy, people care too much about the weight and continuously try to drop weight. Ironically, some of them are actually dropping their lean muscle rather than fat to get lower BMI and weight, causing their original healthy body into unhealthy.

It's really interesting to attend this event and hear different opinions from people in different departments.People have too much prejudice about the fatness and I believe Professor Saguy is in the good direction to discuss fat rightly.

Citations:

1.Wilson, Stephanie. "IS BMI AN ACCURATE MEASURE OF OBESITY." . N.p., E-mail. <IS BMI AN ACCURATE MEASURE OF OBESITY>.

2.Erin, . "Understanding Body Fat Percentage and BMI." . N.p., Online Posting to Live Life Active. E-mail. <http://www.livelifeactive.com/2012/02/22/understanding-body-fat-percentage-and-bmi/>.

3. Picture taken by myself

4.Detrick, Paul. "UCLA Professor Abigail Saguy on What's Wrong with Fat?"Reason.com. N.p., 18 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

5."What's Wrong with Fat?." UCLA Center for the Study of Women, n. d. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/whats-wrong-with-fat-a-book-discussion-with-abigail-saguy>.