The Healthcare and Fitness Industries Can Take Their Racist BMI and Shove It!

Today, I saw a post on Instagram entitled, “The BMI is Racist: A Short History Lesson.” The post then gave a summary about BMI’s, an acronym for Body Mass Index. It was reposted by Be Nourished, a local Portland company founded and co-owned by two of my shero’s, Dana Sturtevant and Hilary Kinavey. The original post by Sunrise Nutrition listed facts about BMI and it’s roots in White Supremacy.

I learned the truth about BMI in my first Body Trust event, a weekend retreat called, Reclaiming Body Trust, through Be Nourished. Consequently, it was a weekend that changed my life!

After that encouraging and enlightening weekend, where the owners, two beautiful women (Hilary and Dana), told me and a room filled with white women, all of us trying to make peace with our bodies and our relationship with food, that how we felt was not our fault. We were the victims of a system and an industry that made billions of dollars every year, that set us up for failure.

They talked about intersectionality, a term new to me at the time, and told everyone in that training that I (the only black woman), had suffered even more injustices because I was not only a woman and in a “bigger body” or fat—a term I had already started to embrace, but also because I was black.

Prior to that event, I had never felt more seen in a training put on by white people and I was fifty years old at the time. I even said to them, I wished my mama was alive to experience that retreat.

Afterwards, I decided to delve deeper into Body Trust, “a radical revisioning of what it means to occupy and care for your body. It is a pathway to acceptance of the body, an alternative dialogue to the conventional paradigm of food, body image, and weight concerns in our culture. Body Trust is paradigm shifting work that invites bravery and fierce body compassion.” I decided to register for their No More Weighting E-Course.

Prior to discovering Be Nourished, which was about a mile from where I lived, I had already been saying that I wasn’t '“weighting” anymore (though theoretically, I really wasn’t quite done dieting yet) so when I read about their e-course, it felt divine for me to enroll. Learning to trust my body seemed in line with my desire to Walk in the Spirit, internally led rather than guided by external plans, like diets. I definitely wanted to learn more.

Now let me say this, it took a LOT for me to come up with the money for the weekend retreat but I was determined to go and God made a way. (Won’t He Do It?!) But when it was time to register for the six week online course, my money was funny and my change was strange! For REAL though. Dana and Hilary, being the woke feminists that they are, offered me Equity Pricing, insuring that I would have access to their program. During those six weeks, I learned more about diet culture and why I could never seem to holistically and sustainably have “success” within that system of dieting, a system of whiteness. 

In the past, I had a white male gynecologist who told me that the height and weight charts weren’t the same for black women. He said that I was “allowed” more body fat. Yet, that same doctor told me that I needed to lose one hundred pounds. He was part of the system that measured how I was “doing” wellness-wise by my weight and BMI, something never even intended for black and brown bodies.

I had to pay for that ill-advice with my money, insurance/copays AND with the harm that system caused me mentally and physically for most of my life in my quest for better health. 

This meme is a reminder of how much I have been oppressed by Patriarchy and Diet Culture. The caption under the post reads, "Another way our healthcare system fails BIPOC.”

One thing’s for sure, at this stage of my life, I’m not trying to be thin or smaller for nobody. No more. 

My attitude today about weight and height charts and BMI’s, is that the healthcare and fitness industries can take their racist BMI and shove it! Mmhmm.

Below is an excerpt from a poem I wrote called, “Abundant Fatness”…

I am perplexed and vexed

By your Body Mass Index

Which doesn’t measure 

Discrimination 

Nor my intersections of stress.

I don’t accept my body being called obese

I’m a divinely created complex beast

With modified and enlightened set points;

A Spirit-walkin’ embodied joint.

Any lesser version of me pales

To my colorful vibrancy, immeasurable by scales.”

Copyright June 2020 * Angela Braxton-Johnson * All Rights Reserved