What Is Healthy - and a (sort of) Book Review of The Heavy by Dara-Lynn Weiss

Definitions:
Healthy:  in good health
Health:  the state of being free from illness or injury
Heavy:  of great weight; difficult to lift or move
Fat:  (of a person or animal) having a large amount of excess flesh
Obese:  grossly fat or overweight

CDC Definitions (Body Mass Index = Weight / Height^2 * 705):
Underweight:  BMI under 18.5
Overweight: BMI 25 - 29.9
Obese:  BMI 30 or above
(and where does the seemingly arbitrary constant of 705 in the calculation come from?)

Most years around the end of the year I get a health screening at work.  Things often slow down between Christmas and New Years so it is a good time to do this.  I knew I had bulked up a bit since the last screening; a stressful year means that food choices often contained some less healthy options.  Also, my hunting had been less than stellar this year so the low fat wild game I tend to eat a lot off was not as available as it usually is (this did mean I ate a lot more baby-back ribs this year, mmmmmmmm.)
My weight was put just into the overweight category.  I'm not surprised by this although my activity level has remained pretty constant.  I still walk between three and five miles most days and in general, my food choices tend to be healthy.  I have almost unmeasureably low LDL (bad) cholesterol, and high HDL (good) cholesterol.  Outside of weight, all other numbers are near the ideal limits.
This prompted me to look into what the CDC considers healthy (defined above).  If we look at the median height man in the US of 5'10" we see that a BMI of 25 splits healthy from overweight and this equates to about 173 pounds.  At the lower end of the healthy range is a weight of about 123 pounds.  Being about this median height, I don't know what it would take to get at the lower end of healthy, but it would probably require a good long methamphetamine run to achieve that drugs over food emaciated look.  Simply put, I don't think the CDC guidelines represent reality.  Reinforcing this, based on the %body-fat my health screening gave me, I would have to lose well over 100% of my body fat to reach the lower limit of the CDC's health guidelines - and I'm already short on upper body strength.

The health screening came on the heels of reading Dara-Lynn Weiss' book The Heavy.  Spoiler alert, while the book is about Ms. Weiss and her overweight daughter, "The Heavy" in the book is actually Ms. Weiss, as in pushing for changes in her daughter.
I'm not sure how this book ended up on my read-list but I resisted for quite some time.  I was expecting this book to be by some self-righteous preachy bitch pushing the latest health trend de jour of raw milk and kale (or something).  I picked up the book in the library many months ago and flipped open the book to see how it was written.  The part I happen to flip through did make Ms. Weiss seem like a psycho (if you've read the book, I happened to open it to the hot chocolate episode).  With not much else to read around Christmas, I finally read The Heavy.
I was wrong about the book.  What is described in the book is a frank and honest journey about weight loss.  I appreciated that the approach used was a sensical math - calories in vs. out approach. Far from a tale about how well a health craze worked, the author admits that processed foods (in moderation) are sometimes a realistically good choice figuring in the time commitments most people face.  After reading the book, I followed that up to see what the reaction to it and Ms. Weiss' Vogue article was.  While the reviews of both were mixed, I believe the vilification of her is off-base.  Much of the criticism revolves around pushing weight loss on a young child.  Part of a parent's job is to teach good habits in childhood so the bad don't need to be unlearned in (young) adulthood.  Kids are taught at a very early age that hitting and lying are wrong, even though the ramifications of both are minimal in kindergarten.  I don't understand how it is less appropriate to teach healthy eating habits.
I think her methods are open for discussion and she is potentially overzealous, but with no shortage of fat people (apparently myself included), it is a goal that should be shared, not maligned.
The book was well written and tells the complete story well.  I think there are a couple fair criticisms of the story.  Writing about the situation in Vogue was really, really dumb.  The same story (told in brief as opposed to the book) in a different magazine which doesn't pray to the god of heroin chic would likely have been better received.
The other criticism is believing the CDC guidelines as some kind of gospel.  Ms. Weiss and her daughter's picture in Vogue do not show two people on the verge of being overweight (she addresses this picture in the book, but her explanation falls flat).  Extending this argument, if two people were shown - and both were at the lower end of the CDC healthy scale, it would probably be hard to suggest that there wasn't some horrible eating disorder causing severe malnutrition.  

So the CDC says I'm overweight.  I'm just going to say I'm corpulent and will continue to eat relatively healthy, and walk my dogs almost every day.  But, maybe I'll also lay off the bags of extra thick flavored chips.