I was totally going to post about something else today, and then, during breakfast I read a horrifying article in the newspaper called "Expect a wider load ahead." I'd post a link to the article, but the spectacular San Diego Union Tribune rarely has the articles from their print version online, or at least not the articles for which I'm looking, and I don't want to waste my time (haha, and I just realized I unintentionally made a pun here!).
Anyway, the article basically says that we stop growing taller, but not wider, and apparently it's not all fat. Our hips continue to widen as we age. CT scans were conducted on 246 randomly selected patients of varying ages and it was found that the pelvic width of the oldest patients was, on average an inch larger than the younger patients, which, "by itself, could lead to an approximately three-inch increase in waist size from age 20 to 79."
What the article doesn't state is why our pelvis continues to widen. Do the hips widen to make us more stable as we age (if we're wider, we're less likely to fall, right?), or are women who've had kids throwing off the average? And I totally don't understand why an inch of pelvic width equals three inches in the waist. The article points out that this widening might "account for a significant portion" of the roughly one-pound-per-year increase in body weight people experience "during the same period." Is it possible that our hips are widening to support the extra weight, and if we didn't gain it, we would stay thinner? And the article doesn't talk about whether or not this roughly 50-pound weight gain is concerning from a health standpoint.
So many unanswered questions!
Ugh. Just what I needed to hear. ;) Could the pelvic widening lead to waist widening because women are shaped like a triangle in that general direction? Widening the base also widens the apex?
ReplyDeleteI just had a vision of turning into a pyramid.
ReplyDelete