viz.

Fat-acceptance activist/blogger Kate Harding has assembled a collection of photographs to illustrate "how ridiculous the BMI really is." Each photo title states the person's BMI status (underweight, normal, obese, and morbidly obese), and the range of representations is both shocking and breathtaking. My favorite is Moxie, the morbidly obese cat with a BMI of 58.6.

What I really love about this collection is that not only does it challenge the arbitrary categorizations of what it means to be "normal" or "morbidly obese" (one woman in that painful category is pictured at a Tai Chi tournament in Japan), but it also challenges the individual's conceptions of what those categories represent. For example, a "normal" individual may actually look "underweight," while many of the "obese" (such a loaded term) women are, to put it bluntly, smokin' hot. And then there is Shauna Marsh Reid, who has lost fully half of her body weight, going from 352 pounds to 176, extensively documented here, yet still falls under the BMI category of "overweight." Despite the fact that she is healthier than she has ever been in her life, the lack of context inherent to the BMI works to condemn her as still somehow unacceptable.