Feminist scholars have, for many years now, analyzed and interpreted the problems of body image that plague Western culture. Susan Bordo, Sandra Lee Bartky, Susie Orbach, and bell hooks are only a couple examples of prominent feminists who have examined the problem of how women understand their bodies, the cultural expectations for women’s bodies, and how these expectations produce a skewed body image that has little to do with “health.”

Similarly, what constitutes a healthy female body is also a contentious issue, as more recent explorations of health perceptions have shown us. A recent Tumblr post explicitly challenges some of the standard tools of Western medicine for determining healthy body weight.

Foz Meadows’s post, entitled “Female Bodies, a Weighty Issue,” made the rounds recently on social media. In her post, she argues that we as a society are still obsessed with thinness and ideal female body types that have little to do with lived reality. She explodes the concept of BMI as an accurate measurement of health, considers the problematic institution of clothing sizes for women, and examines the lack of linkage between weight and health. She concludes by arguing that “fat” simply means “not thin,” thus anticipating the criticism of many who are quick to point out that being overweight or obese can have detrimental effects on one’s long-term health. The issue is not about obesity; the issue, for Meadows, is that women who do not embody an ideal of female beauty (unnatural and unattainable for the majority of women) are often perceived as fat.