This fitness blogger says her after photo is apparently considered 'obese'
āGaining weight isnāt the end of the worldā
āGaining weight isnāt the end of the worldā
āGaining weight isnāt the end of the worldā
Numbers like weight and BMI can never give you a full snapshot of your health. But just as one can get suckered in with the promise of a quick-fix diet, it's often easy to let weight fluctuations mess with your confidence.
Fitness blogger Lucy Mountain shared before and after photos of herself on labeled ānormalā and āobese.ā She looks pretty fit in both pics, but says sheās actually considered obese in the second pic.
In the caption, Lucy explained that the photos are of herself at her lightest and heaviest over the span of 10 months. āI donāt often weigh myself,ā she wrote. āNot because I find it ādepressing,' ...itās just not a marker which I use to determine success. I consider myself neutral to the number.ā
But Lucy says that she started a new 12-week training program and was curious to see where her muscle mass was before she started. Since July, her stats say that she had an increase in body fat, sheās maintained her muscle, and she now has a waist-to-hip ratio thatās defined as āobese.ā
Lucy says that the āobeseā label, along with the fact that sheās gained about nine pounds, ācould have been a pretty wonderful recipe to feel v sh** about myself. But in truth, I have the self-awareness to know I am in fact neither of those labels, Iām still an alright person and Iām actually doing okay.ā
Lucy says sheās thankful that her photo proves that numbers can't always define your health and canāt determine your self-worth. And, of course, she points out, āGaining weight isnāt the end of the world.ā
Lucy talked about this weight gain before on her IG feed. "I have gained 4kg [about nine pounds] and didn't die!" she joked in a post from December.
"My life hasn't fallen apart, my friends still like me (I think) and I don't look that different in clothes," she wrote. She added that bodies are "fluid" and change all the timeāand that's totally normal and okay. "My body will look like it did in May (and many other shapes) at some point again, and my body will look like it does now (and many other shapes) at some point after that."
BMI is shady, and that weight is "just a number." But sometimes, itās nice to be confronted with actual, photographic evidence that the āobeseā label can be wrong, and that non-scale victories like healthy eating and exercise accomplishments are just as, if not more, important.