What’s Wrong With Ideal?

So Pilon put up his long awaited post on how to calculate ideal lean body mass for women.

(it’s a followup to the same post for men – how to calculate ideal lean body mass for men)

Naturally, as soon as it came out, the hate mail began.

Things such as:

“I never expected this from you”

“This is the problem with the world today”

etc…

But why the hate mail.  After all, we aren’t telling you how you SHOULD look.  That’s your choice.  If how you look right now is working for you… then why would you even worry about it?

Sure, some people may be uncomfortable talking about what’s “most attractive”.

However, lets be honest… “most attractive” ultimately is just a proxy for “healthiest”.

When you look at all the epidemiological data… you’re not looking for “attractive”, you’re correlating “health”.  Now, it just so happens that other research shows that these body shapes are generally judged to be “most attractive” by most everyone as a rule.

And this should make sense.  The “healthiest” people will have more opportunities to mate.  All these are are signals of “genetic fitness”… of overall virility and health.

We have healthy parameters for all sorts of metrics about the human body.  No one gets worked up when they have high blood pressure, yet BP comes is a range of values that are “healthy”, and the vast majority of the population doesn’t blink an eye at this.

At the end of the day, what is ultimately being proposed are external convergence points and thresholds to approximate “best health”, based on the available data on both fat mass and fat free mass, combined with research on attractiveness.  The convergence points for BOTH are roughly the same.

What’s so scary about that?

After all, most of you buy “healthy” food that doesn’t make you “healthy”, so why the blowback when an ACTUAL way of measuring a state of health emerges?

Why the fear of a certain look, a certain amount of fat, and a certain amount of lean body mass?

Why is this harder to fathom than having your wallet robbed from claims of unnecessary supplements?

Many of our clients have gotten bloodwork done after getting to these “shapes”… they are all pretty much optimum.  So it’s not like we haven’t gotten our OWN data on this… done our own preliminary research to at least verify in part what the external data is SCREAMING at us.

So I ask again, why is this so scary?