You can never be too thin.  Oh, yes, you can.  My sister-in-law,  Pearl, was a tall, thin, beautiful woman, extremely intelligent.  At five foot seven inches tall, she weighed one hundred and twelve pounds.  If you are jealous, don’t worry, so was I.  Pearl made it look so easy.  Then, in her eighties, she developed Hodgkins disease.   After chemotherapy, Pearl dropped to eighty pounds.  She really was a skeleton with skin, and she had no resources left.  After a few years, we lost Pearl.

My mother was a beautiful woman with a perfect body and beautiful legs.  I was born with crooked legs.  They take a fifteen degree turn in different directions at the knees.  I have always carried an extra ten pounds over what the charts say I should weigh, but in my teens I had a twenty-three inch waist.  And, in my senior year, when I covered  up my legs with a full length gown, I was chosen as the prom queen.  Carrying an “extra” 10 pounds.  Recently, I suffered months of coughing due to a perfume trigger to my asthma.  I lost 12 pounds, but I was still a healthy weight with lots of resources (strength) left.

Prom Queen

Hollywood puts an image before us of what the ideal woman (and man) should look like.  Then there is Barbie and Playboy.  None of them are normal.  I like to watch TV shows from Britain.  Their actors look like real people.  Want to talk about BMI?  Weight lifters have high BMI’s, but their weight is all muscle.  The goal, therefore, is to be healthy, not too thin.  Everyone is different, by design.  The Bible tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.  And we were made to be unique.  God judges us on our insides, our character, not on our outsides, our BMI.  We can always make improvements and present our best selves to others, but to obsess over not measuring up to some Hollywood image is a waste of time.  Besides, as you get older, you are really happy when everything still works and you don’t worry about meeting the standards of an arbitrary chart.