In the corporate world, I hear this buzzword. It’s not a major buzzword or buzz phrase, like “outside the box,” “unconscious bias,” etc. But in my world, I hear it now and then. It refers to a range of choices. You generally cannot get a size 48 t-shirt. Instead, you get an extra-large. Instead of 50 sizes, you get 4 or maybe 6 choices. Sometimes this kind of thinking helps when a business is trying to streamline and be more efficient, though the customer may prefer a wider range of choices. And the fewer sizes available, the less accurate the sizing becomes.
One-size-fits-all is the extreme version of this. In the early days of the automobile, Henry Ford famously said of the Model T, “They can have any color they want, as long as it’s black.” That would have worked for me. In fact, I have a black Ford in my garage as we speak.
When it comes to the human body, if there were levels of uniqueness, it would be perhaps the most unique thing in the universe. No two are alike, ever. In fact, my body of a second ago is different than my body now. The only constant over time is change.
The Body Mass Index is a kind of t-shirt size for health management. It’s an estimate based on its correlation to body composition. Target numbers are given
I have been fairly vocal about the shortcomings of BMI. I like this humorous article about those shortcomings in the “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” column of Swift Economics. At least I think it’s humorous.
https://swifteconomics.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics-the-bmi/
All this is, of course, my opinion, as are most of the statements I make on Running: A FEVER. And I carry this ideological bias into meetings with health professionals and sometimes take their advice with not so much a grain of salt as perhaps a pound of salt. But saltiness aside, I shouldn’t use my biases to justify ignoring good advice, even if it’s not perfect advice.
My advice to you is to keep that fever for health if you’ve got it already. And if you don’t, catch it and in any case, pass on to someone else what you like or dislike about the podcast. Check out RunningAFEVER.com, subscribe on YouTube, review us on Apple Podcasts; and I will be eternally grateful, and I will talk to you next time on Running: A FEVER.
Image by Johanna Pakkala from Pixabay