BMI and Beauty Pagents: The saga continues

So remember when everyone was all ACK! SIZE ZERO MODELS ARE DROPPING DEAD ON THE RUNWAY AND RUINING OUR GIRLS’ MINDS!!!!!!

Well the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. And it’s attempting to flatten on Ms. Chloe Marshall, a plus-size model from England, reigning Miss Surrey (a county just south of London).

Ms. Marshall is 5’10 and 176 pounds (or so the US papers say), giving her a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25.3. The “normal” range is 18 - 25. She’s not exactly obese - in fact she would have to be 210 pounds to be technically obese. Chloe is spoutin’ lots of curvy girl power and frankly, she’s pretty hot, so more power to her.

But one Ms. Monica Grenfell, a dietitian and columnist for the UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, thinks that Chloe is a v. bad role model. If you don’t care to read the whole article then I’ll give you some choice snippets:

“It would send an appalling - and very dangerous - message to other young women that it’s OK to be fat.... Chloe is a stark reminder that obesity is now virtually normal in our society - and we should all be hanging our heads in shame.....She is an ambassador not for the beautiful larger lady as she’d have us believe but a poster girl for diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and all the other devastating and potentially fatal health problems that are caused or exacerbated by obesity. “

Now I must return to the fact that Chloe ain’t obese. Whether she’ll end up obese in later life is another question (the girl is only 17), but it is certainly not a forgone conclusion. Ms. Grenfell says that Chole’s BMI is 26.03 (she obviously has slightly different information about her weight). Whatever. While BMI certainly isn’t the be all end all measure of health, at 25.3 or 26.03 it’s clear that Chloe is very slightly overweight (by 2 to 7 pounds based on a normal upper limit of 24.9).

Of course Ms. Grenfell, the DIETITIAN says that Chloe should have a BMI of 20 - or about 140 pounds. This is unabashedly wrong. I’d expect a profession to know that. Of course this is the woman who wrote “5 Days to a Flatter Stomach.” And, more recently, “Crash Diet: Lose 7 Pounds in 7 Days.”

Oh blah. Blah blah. We can’t win, can we? You’re either glorifying skinniness, or fatness AND FOR GOD’S SAKE LET’S THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN. The simple fact is that Chloe is a weeee bit overweight and many models are a weee bit underweight. When we start praising “curves” on a 250 pound 5’4” woman (BMI 42.9) or the “elegance” of some 5’11” chick who only weighs 95 pounds (BMI 13.2) then we should get worried.