Challenging the Obesity Myth: Men’s Critical Understandings of the Body Mass Index

This chapter presents the qualitative data generated during a study of men and weight-related issues, incorporating interviews and ethnography in a commercial weight-loss group in Northeast England. It explores men’s everyday embodied meanings and orientations to what they defined as problematic rather than uncritically accept the social construction of ‘the obesity epidemic’ as determined by the Body Mass Index (BMI). The chapter reports men’s justificatory ‘accounts’ that challenge the BMI and associated moral positioning. Men’s accounts, which ‘justify’ levels of body mass deemed overweight or obese on the BMI, include: the compatibility of heaviness, healthiness and physical fitness, looking and feeling ill at a supposedly ‘healthy’ BMI, and rejecting irrational standardization. It examines an approach yields challenging insights even when talking with men who sought to lose weight in order to fit in with a fat phobic society. The chapter helps to redress the virtual lacuna of empirical studies on men’s everyday understandings within the anti-obesity terrain.