The New York Times this week offered some encouraging news to people who are always a few LBs over what they're told is "healthy," but who otherwise feel pretty good. Health isn't about how thin you are; it's about how well your body works -- your heart, the level of cholesterol in your blood, your whole cardiovascular system.

According to the report, roughly one third of the technically "obese" people in America are "metabolically healthy." In other words, their systems are in great shape, and they'll even out-perform a lot of much thinner people on a treadmill.

This is because a full 25% of thin people -- or those who fall into the "healthy" range for Body Mass Index, or BMI -- have at least two cardiovascular risk factors typically associated with obesity.

As the article states, it's better to be fat and fit than skinny and unfit.

This isn't to say, of course, that we've been wrong all this time about the correlation between weight and health: as a rule, it's better to be thin, provided you're healthy and healthily thin. (This may seem like a redundancy, but it's not.)

What it does show, however, is that being hefty might not be bad provided your body is in good working order. And that comes down to the individual, not some generalizing, homogenizing principle that treats all bodies as one.

Maybe now the media will finally ease up a bit on the beauty myth, begin embracing a wider variety of body types, and encourage a lot of heavier people to feel as good about themselves as they do on a jog around the park.

[Image: Courtesy of the US Government]