Ahna, thanks for reading and taking the time to respond. I sincerely appreciate both, and your feedback is appreciated.
However, I must say I think you misinterpreted the piece, at least slightly.
If you head to my piece and press ctrl + F and do a search, you'll find the word “regular” never comes up once. Only when discussing BMI, a far-from-perfect number that's broken down into three ranges to help predict health outcomes, did I use the term “normal” because that's what the range all of these people fell into is called (underweight, normal, overweight, obese).
When it comes to discussions of weight, things get quite complex because people frame it as either a cosmetic issue (like the magazines), a romantic issue (what's romantically desirable), or a health issue (what's most likely to lead to a positive health outcome).
This article spans all three.
I understand what you're saying. I explained how people consistently rated other people in the healthy BMI range as more attractive, though that trended toward the lower end of the range.
And guess what, you fall in the normal range, as well.
A woman who is 40 years old, 5'3" and 140 pounds, is within the "normal" range on the BMI scale. So it's certainly not women under 120 lbs.
The average weight of women in the US is about 179 lbs, but remember, that's an average. Statistical outliers jack up the numbers.
If you started out at 120 lbs and lost weight, you could only lose about 60 lbs before you'd have some serious life-threatening complications. But humans can get up to 600 lbs and beyond. It takes 10 anorexic people dropping from 120 to 60 lbs to make up for one 600 lb person suffering from severe obesity.
No one in the normal BMI range can lose 500 lbs, but we can sure gain it.
It's like rent in LA. Just because the average rent in an area is $4,500, doesn't mean that's what you'll pay—it just means the guy on the corner with the $20,000 house and the woman across the street with the $30,000 house are jacking up the average so it no longer reflects what could be expected.
All in all, the piece isn't here to vindicate women of certain body sizes. It's to criticize our industries for promoting a singular vision of what bodies should look like for a very long time, and understand what people really think.
One last note, when it comes to health and not cosmetics, even the "overweight" range has been shown to have no health detriments in a ton of studies. It's only when people begin to tip into obesity that we start seeing negative health outcomes. I just have to put this as a disclaimer.
Hopefully, this comment clears things up. Sincerely, thank you so much for taking the time to comment.
