Nintendo has just introduced a game called Wii Fit. Wii Fit sounds pretty damn cool to me. You get a control board that you can stand on and, while you play any one of about 40 activities on the game, the board reads your movements and makes an avatar do what you are doing. You lean left while skiing, so your avatar leans left. Pretty cool. Nintendo's spokefolks have said that they don't really mean the game to replace other exercise. "It's not meant to replace a regimented workout schedule, but instead to compliment your existing exercise routine," a spokesman told journalist Chad Sapieha (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080516.WBwgtgameblog030120080516111238/WBStory/WBwgtgameblog0301).

So, here's the part where Wii Fit stops sounding so cool to me. You enter your height and weight and some other info, and the game tells you your BMI.

Now, most of my readers are big girls, and I haven't met a big girl yet who doesn't know more about body and diet stuff than most nutrition experts, so I bet most of you already know what BMI means. For those who don't, BMI (Body Mass Index) uses your height, weight, and gender to give you a "healthy" weight range. According to the Center for Disease Control, "BMI provides a reliable indicator of body fatness for most people and is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems" (http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/). Note the "most people." This is important. BMI is not always right, nor does it always indicate how fat you are (I won't even bother now to go into the research that says many of the health problems blamed on weight are actually truly about inactivity, and that fat people who move are healthier than thin people who don't regardless of BMI. That's a blog for another day...)

BMI is an improvement on the old insurance charts that used to be the basis for "ideal weight". Still, BMI is meant to be used as a guideline. All kinds of things can throw it off. For example, people like weight lifters and professional athletes are known to be off the chart at times because they have so much muscle that their weight has nothing to do with how fat they are. Another group highly likely to have a misleading BMI? Kids. Their bodies change too much, too fast for a chart to be a realistic measure of their health. As the CDC says, "For children, BMI is used to screen for overweight, at risk of overweight, or underweight. However, BMI is not a diagnostic tool. For example, a child may have a high BMI for age and sex, but to determine if excess fat is a problem, a health care provider would need to perform further assessments. These assessments might include skinfold thickness measurements, evaluations of diet, physical activity, family history, and other appropriate health screenings."

So, now you have this video game that's supposed to encourage health. Then you have kids going to play the game, entering their height and weight, and being told they are fat. And I don't mean the game tells you your BMI and then you figure out what that means. I mean the game literally calls you fat if your BMI is out of the range considered healthy. The game apparently has three body type categories: underweight, ideal, and fat.

I hope I don't even have to tell you why it's wrong for a game to use the word ideal to describe a body type. Ideal is not a universal standard of anything. It's a loaded word based on our own feelings and perspectives. And, of course, so is the word fat. At least words like underweight and overweight are based on the (flawed) medical standard of the BMI. Ideas like ideal and fat are based on cultural messages about what is desirable, what you should be trying to be, what is too much.  This could be problematic with anyone. It's especially problematic for kids.

 First, kids aren't ready yet to deal with the pressure of ideals. They're supposed to be loved for who they are. (Yes, we all are. But as adults we have more responsibility for who we are than kids do). Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know kids have to learn about the hard real world sooner or later. In the hard real world, people will call them fat. But, damn! If they're actually fat, trust me, they are getting enough of that from the real world. And if they're not, don't make them think they are!

But, second, even if you agree that kids today are too fat and need to be more active, surely we must at least consider that BMI is often just WRONG when it comes to kids. A representative from the National  Obesity Forum, one of the British organizations opposing Wii Fit's use of BMI, told Yahoo news that "BMI is far from perfect but with children it simply should not be used. A child's BMI can change every month and it is perfectly possible for a child to be stocky, yet still very fit." (To read the whole article, visit yahoo news:
http://us.i1.yimg.com/videogames.yahoo.com/feature/wii-fit-or-wii-fat-/1213585)

As one other blogger put it, "While we don't appreciate Wii Fit's attempt to make people look like mini-Skeletors, the message is clear: take this game with a grain of salt. Wii Fit isn't a doctor or nutritionist -- it's just a game. So don't let it launch you into a hunger strike, or turn you into an anorexic." (http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/2008/05/07/wii-fit-has-a-broad-definition-of-fat/)  This is sound advice for adults, although I admit if a game called me fat, my level of annoyance or insult would likely be based  more on my mood for the day that anything else. On one day, I might be like, "F you, Wii! You're mama's fat!" On another day, I might see it as devastating evidence that I'm not so huge that even my gaming system finds it urgent to let me know. Grain of salt one day; salt in the wound another.

But I'm a grown-up. At 33, I have coping mechanisms for insults (intended or not) that a child playing this game is not likely to have.  At 8 or 12 or 14, if a video game had called me fat, that would've been evidence in support of my endless fear that I would grow up to die ugly and alone.  This game is like the electronic equivalent of my experience with junior high school P.E. As it was, just the idea that I was too fat to exercise without embarrassing myself kept me from exercising for years.  If my entertainment had actually told me I was fat, I probably ended up the result of an afterschool special about teen eating disorders.  I had enough real life people who didn't have the sense not to criticize my body all the time. I damn sure didn't need a game for help with that.  No kids do.

 
By the way, Nintendo has apparently apologized for its language use but hasn't admitted that using BMI on kids is wrong.  You can send them a note if you'd like to tell them what you think. http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/admform.jsp