When I grew up in Switzerland, I had this frustrating problem of being attracted to a body type that simply didn't exist there. Sure, there were minor variations in body size, but virtually no one was fat. I wondered why I was longing after something that only seemed to exist in pictures.
Apparently things have changed back there. This morning when I perused the online edition of the Zurich, Switzerland newspaper (Tages Anzeiger), one of the headlines was that every second Swiss is now too fat. Having just been there for a week this past summer and seeing things largely unchanged, I found that hard to believe.
Well, while here in the US we're going by the nearly incomprehensible BMI (Body Mass Index) to figure out whether we are fat or how fat we are, the Swiss use a much simpler way: just measure your waist. That's all.
Turns out that the Federal Office of Public Health decreed that 58% of all Swiss women and 48% of all Swiss men measure too much around the waist and are therefore too fat. BAG, which is the acronym for the Swiss ministry, claims that waist circumference is actually a better indicator of all the ills and evils of obesity than the BMI.
So where's the border of being too fat using waist circumference? That'd be 31.5 inches for women and 37 inches for men. Yikes.
[Google translation of article from German]
Apparently things have changed back there. This morning when I perused the online edition of the Zurich, Switzerland newspaper (Tages Anzeiger), one of the headlines was that every second Swiss is now too fat. Having just been there for a week this past summer and seeing things largely unchanged, I found that hard to believe.
Well, while here in the US we're going by the nearly incomprehensible BMI (Body Mass Index) to figure out whether we are fat or how fat we are, the Swiss use a much simpler way: just measure your waist. That's all.
Turns out that the Federal Office of Public Health decreed that 58% of all Swiss women and 48% of all Swiss men measure too much around the waist and are therefore too fat. BAG, which is the acronym for the Swiss ministry, claims that waist circumference is actually a better indicator of all the ills and evils of obesity than the BMI.
So where's the border of being too fat using waist circumference? That'd be 31.5 inches for women and 37 inches for men. Yikes.
[Google translation of article from German]
