How is this wrong? Let me count the ways.

[kiya]

From A Natural Guide to Pregnancy and Postpartum Health by some people claiming to be medical professionals:

"Type 2 diabetes can often be fully resolved by returning to the appropriate weight for your height - often what you weighed in high school, assuming you were a relatively thin teenager."

This is not the first, "And yay, you can lose weight with this advice too!" bit of commentary in the book, but it's the one that finally has driven me to fuming rage.

Someone with 'MD' after his name (I don't know what the letterspew after the first-listed author means, and I can't be bothered looking it up) who's giving advice to postpartum women should perhaps keep in mind that skeletal development in things like the pelvis can continue until well into the twenties, and perhaps evaluating health on the basis of what an underdeveloped bone structure weighs is bone stupid.

And that's without getting into 'the appropriate weight for your height' as if there were only one, and it were totally independent of other health factors, heritage, bone structure, and so on. Or ....

.... damnit, I want to bite something.

Comments

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if I weighed what I weighed as a teenager I would be being hospitalised right now. I'm two or three inches taller and a bit under a stone heavier and STILL on the light side of healthy for my bone structure.

[rin-x-x.livejournal.com]

The whole "weight for your height" thing is SO outdated, and has been proven as such (and better, but still flawed systems are out there) yet its perpetuated as the ideal imagine. Hell, if I was my "proper weight" for my height, I'd look anorexic with balloons attached to my chest.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I can so sympathize. I was told by the Army, years ago, that I was supposed to be 175 lbs max. Granted, I'm 125 pounds heavier than that; but, even though I have a 56 inch waist, my *shoulders* are 54" around. I haven't weighed that little since I was twelve years old!

[brooksmoses]

.... damnit, I want to bite something.

Might I recommend stewed idiotic nutritionist? It's good for the health. (If not yours, at least of the people who would otherwise have listened to said nutritionist!)

[zeborah]

Especially when it qualifies with "assuming you were a relatively thin teenager". So not only should adult women weigh the same as teenagers, they should weigh the same as thin teenagers. <boggle>

[ardaniel]

My 40" hips beg to differ with their assessment.

[kaifu.livejournal.com]

What everyone else said.

Also, "Type 2 diabetes can often be fully resolved" strikes me as saying that, one can cure it by simply losing weight?! Err, mitigation treatment =/= cure, neither does it imply "resolution" to me.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The problem is, of course, that being fat does not give you diabetes. Having diabetes makes you fat.

And I am currently weighing slightly more (but wearing jeans two sizes smaller) than I did when I left high school.

I was never a thin anything.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Actually, having diabetes made meiczyslaw skinny. Very skinny, very fast. That's partly how we noticed it. /:

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

The bone structure part is the one I want to pound people over. I mean, the "Color Me Beautiful" people grok bone structure. (I'm a petite frame with borderline "medium" to "grand" bones, in their estimation. You measure at the bony part of your wrist.)

If beauty-advice people can get this, how come doctors can't? q:

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

There's an influential Harvard Medical school type who has been pushing this thin-is-healthy delusion for years; it's politically very difficult to stop him, and it's quite common for doctors to believe it, as something they have always known, rather than being aware of the most recent work on the subject. (The study, that would legitimately have cost an awful lot of money, about fat as a health risk, didn't get done in the 70s; the hypothesis the folks responsible for that decision considered so strong the study wasn't required turns out to be false, but it's still widely believed.)

Beauty advice people aren't faced with the awful prospect of having to admit they were wrong, and thus liable for untold millions of dollars in damages. They're also faced with not getting paid if they make people feel worse about themselves. It encourages a certain resolute empiricism.

They also get paid for dealing with complicated on a per-person basis; most medical systems want something much, much simpler than that, ideally a single numerical range from a diagnostic test. They don't want to have to measure fifteen things to know how to categorize you as a health risk.