Ilona Maher on Her ‘Overweight’ BMI: ‘I’m Going to the Olympics and You Aren’t’
Body mass index has (rightfully) been called out time and time again as a deeply flawed metric of health, but internet trolls still love to invoke it when they’re trying to weight-shame. So when Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, who is set to compete at the Paris Games, recently flagged a nasty comment speculating about her BMI, we couldn’t help fist-pumping her chill “so what?!” response.
On July 10, Maher posted an Instagram reel responding to a comment that implied she was obese by BMI standards. “I bet that person has a 30% bmi,” the commenter had written, followed by the “Tears of Joy” emoji. As Maher shared in the reel, at five ten and 200 pounds, she actually does have a BMI of 30 (well, 29.3, to be exact), putting her in the “overweight” category and a mere 0.7 points from the “obese” range, according to the CDC.
“I think you were trying to roast me,” she said, addressing the original commenter, “but this is actually a fact.”
Continuing, Maher said she talked with her dietitian about BMI and “how it really isn’t helpful for athletes.” “[My] BMI doesn’t really tell you what I can do. It doesn’t tell you what I do on the field, how fit I am, it’s just a couple numbers put together,” she said.
It can be particularly off for athletes—they tend to have a higher percentage of muscle mass, which can mess with the height and weight calculation. But it’s flawed for the general population as well. In fact, in 2023, the American Medical Association released a report calling it an “imperfect” tool, and the CDC even takes care to note that BMI is “not diagnostic of the body fatness or health of an individual.” Some reasons: The original BMI standards were largely based on white populations, so they tend to overestimate risk for Black people and underestimate risk for Asian folks. In addition, other factors, like pregnancy, age, and—as we mentioned with Maher—high muscle mass can also skew your score. What’s more, a 2023 study published in the journal PLOS One found that a BMI in the “overweight” category was generally not associated with an increased risk of premature death from any cause during a follow-up period of up to 20 years, highlighting the tool’s potential limitations.
“So yeah,” Maher concluded in the reel. “I do have a BMI of 30. I am considered overweight. But alas, I’m going to the Olympics, and you’re not.”
Maher, a body positivity advocate who makes a point of wearing lipstick during her rugby games, has previously spoken out about the negative impact of toxic beauty standards and the pressure to look a certain way. In December 2023, she shared a photo of her own cellulite on TikTok to prove “we all have it.” More recently, she told SELF that she feels female athletes “are put into a box sometimes.” “And I don’t like that,” she said. “I’d like it to be like…you can be all these things. You can be beautiful and you can want to get dressed up, but also be a great player on the field.”
Her message (and that epic mic drop at the end) clearly resonated with other folks aside from just us: Less than 24 hours after it was posted, the reel had more than 110,000 likes. And for those who would counsel her to “just ignore the haters,” she also has some choice words: “No, thank you,” she wrote in a caption on the Instagram reel. “As long as people keep commenting dumb stuff I will continue to clap back and stand up for myself.”
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