Is 4-foot 9-inch 10-year-old girl who weighs 84 lbs fat? According to Nintendo’s Wii Fit game, she is. Wii Fit’s “fat” or “fit” is based solely on BMI. This young girl is active–she swims and dances–yet she is declared not just “unfit” but “fat” by a video game.  The article below reports that the girl in question is “devastated” to be labeled “overweight.”  And rightly so. This is such a delicate age for body image issues–and being called fat by your video game is just the kind of thing that triggers serious body image issues.

This is just one more example where BMI does not accurately represent health and fitness.

(Source:Pocket-lint)

Could Wii Fit create bad body image?

Concerns after game labels young girl “fat”

NEWS: 7 May 2008 15:32 GMT by Verity Burns

Parents on an online forum have expressed concerns over Nintendo’s Wii Fit creating a bad body image, particularly with young girls.

The controversy was sparked after a user complained that the game labelled her relative overweight.

“My [relative] came round this weekend and we let her play on our Wii Fit”, she wrote. “We have all laughed and joked about being told that we’re fat and need to lose weight but I was gobsmacked when it told her that she is overweight.”

According to the poster, the girl in question is a healthy 4-foot 9-inch 10-year-old who swims, dances and weighs only six stone [US 84 lbs]. “She is solidly built”, the poster adds, “but not fat”.

Apparently the young girl was “devastated” to be labelled as overweight.

The poster added: “I know it is just a game but seriously we already have to worry about young girls starving themselves to look like the magazine models and now we have a game that tells them they’re fat”.

Forum users have replied with varying responses, many angrily and backing the poster’s decision to write and complain to Nintendo (they are yet to reply).

However as one forum member pointed out, Wii Fit merely utilises the internationally-used BMI scale to calculate whether a user is overweight or not, and so Nintendo cannot be held responsible for the outcome.

BMI is considered by some to not be the best way to measure weight as it does not take into account frame or muscle.