A Thin Woman Trapped in a Fat Man's Body

by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

By and large, Americans buy, and are large. We consume too much and don't get enough exercise. Be honest, now, when was the last time you went outside for a nice, brisk morning waddle?

People in other countries are making fun of our girth - even Germans, whose main diet staple is lard and who, in general, are built like farm machinery made of meat.

Fortunately, help is on the way. Wondrous new technologies are coming to our rescue. I recently had my body-fat percentage tested on a sophisticated apparatus that works as follows: You take your shoes and socks off and stand on a little scale, which shoots electrons up one leg into your pelvis, where they boing around in your butt, colliding with fat cells, muscle cells, reproductive organs, etc., and then rocket back down through your other leg and into the machine, which analyzes your fat content based on this unnerving reconnaissance. For some reason, this is considered way better than the old-fashioned system, which was to pinch some waist fat with medical calipers.

(My guess is that medical calipers became useless in measuring Americans' fat folds, and fireplace tongs lack sufficient accuracy.)

Anyway, my reading said I am too fat. I have two options to bring my percentage of body fat to within normal levels: Option One: lose some weight through a sustained regimen of sensible eating and regular exercise; or, Option Two: have a sex-change operation.

Option Two would work because, to be considered healthy, women are permitted to have higher body fat than men. My body fat reading of twenty-three percent would have been normal for a woman of my age and height, whereas, for a man, it is an indication that he is basically a stick of margarine with ears. In my opinion, this is part of a long-standing anti-male bias in the Weight Biz. In the mid 1990s the Medical Establishment released a new Optimal Weight chart that replaced the old, familiar system people my age grew up with. The old one took your height and weight and sex, and adjusted your optimal weight by whether you were "large-boned," "medium boned," or "small-boned" (everyone, of course, declared himself/herself "large-boned"). The newer system was more complex, involving body mass, and it appeared to have been drawn up by ticked off feminists. Under the new criteria, a perfectly normal, healthy man with a stocky build - your typical major league catcher, for example - was computed to be overweight. But short women got a break. Someone built like Madeleine Albright, for example, was not defined as fat even though she is built - I mean no disrespect here - like an igloo.

Apparently, the assault on men continues. I went for my body-fat measurement with my friend Pat, who is tiny. Pat is 5 feet 1.5 inches tall and weighs exactly 100 pounds. No reasonable person could look at Pat and call her overweight; no reasonable person would call her underweight, either. Pat stepped on the machine, which declared that to bring her fat levels to normal range - to become a perfectly healthy, normal American woman - Pat would have to ... gain 17 pounds.

Pat laughed, said the results were obviously in error and completely meaningless. But she walked away with this big smile on her face, and spent the remainder of the day on an ice cream-and-brownie binge.

I was advised to lose five to ten pounds or risk remaining somewhat overweight. This was sobering news. I was fully prepared to address the serious danger to my health when, the very next week, a new study came out, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that the best way to live a long life was to be ... somewhat overweight!

At this vulnerable point, when I didn't quite know what to do and needed some lucid and un-ambiguous guidance, the U.S.D.A. unveiled its new food pyramid. Have you seen this thing? It is clear that, left to their own devices, the nutrition-weenie designers of the new food pyramid would have instead created a food rhombus or a food hypercube or an inverted isosceles food dodecahedron, but were persuaded by U.S.D.A. public relations people that the thing had to at least seem simple. So the food pyramid now is three dimensional, with six partitions of different widths and colors. But it is very, very easy to use, according to the gigantic inter-active Web site you must consult to understand it.

Unfortunately, once you decipher it, the new food pyramid is pretty specific. Apparently, I need to eat a lot more broccoli.

So I'm weighing Option Two. I hear black pantyhose are very slimming.

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