Olympian Ilona Maher Responds to Online Body Shaming

Competing in the Olympics is a dream realized by so few athletes. It’s an accomplishment that speaks to an incredible amount of hard work, determination, talent, and an ability to shut out the noise — which is exactly what Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher found herself doing on TikTok this month when a viewer left a body-shaming comment on her account.

The comment speculated on Maher’s body-mass index (BMI), with the commenter writing, “I bet that person has a 30% BMI.” Never mind that BMI is not an accurate predictor of health (we’ll get to that later), and also not something that’s measured in percentages, and also not something you can tell just by looking at a person. Maher, who’s competing for Team USA in her second Olympics, couldn’t let the body-shaming slide.

“Hi, thank you for this comment,” Maher said in her response, which was posted July 10 and has recently gone viral on multiple platforms. “I think you were trying to roast me, but this is actually a fact.” Maher noted that she does have a BMI of around 30 — “29.3, to be exact” — and that this isn’t the first time she’s had to hear unsolicited comments about her body size.

“I’ve been considered overweight my whole life,” the athlete said. She shared a memory from high school, when she turned in a physical at school that stated she was overweight. “I was so embarrassed to turn that in and have that written there,” she said. “My whole life I’ve been this way.”

In conversations with her dietitian, though, Maher has been able to shift her perspective. “I go off facts, and not just what pops up [in my mind],” she said. “We talked about BMI, and we talked about how it’s really not helpful for athletes.”

BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters, then using the answer to place them in a category ranging from underweight to healthy to overweight or obese. However, many experts argue we shouldn’t rely on BMI when it comes to assessing health. In 2023, the American Medical Association announced a new policy urging doctors to not rely solely on BMI to diagnose obesity for numerous reasons, including its inability to “account for differences across race/ethnic groups, sexes, genders, and age-span,” as well as its “historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations.”

“Height and weight plugged into a formula leaves out some very important determinants of health, so the BMI scale shouldn’t be considered the gold standard of health status,” Jenn Baswick, the Intuitive Nutritionist, RD, MHSc, previously told SheKnows.

The AMA also noted that BMI isn’t accurate when it comes to assessing body fat on an individual level. As Maher mentioned, that’s especially true for athletes.

Due to the simplicity of the BMI equation, “[a] person with lots of muscle and minimal body fat can have the same BMI as a person with obesity who has much less muscle,” Yale Medicine notes. “[A]n athlete with much more muscle than fat can have a BMI in the overweight range.”

Or, as Maher puts it, “BMI doesn’t tell you what I can do. It doesn’t tell you what I can do on the field. How fit I am. It’s just a couple of numbers put together,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you how much muscle I have, or anything like that.”

BMI isn’t a useful barometer for health on an individual level, so it definitely shouldn’t be used as a way to body-shame someone. (In fact, while we’re on the subject, no physical attributes should be used to body-shame. Can we maybe just stop body-shaming, period?) And as Maher says in a more recent TikTok, the Olympics are the perfect way to showcase that all bodies are capable and strong.

“As the Olympics officially start today, I want you to take a look at all the different body types on display,” Maher said in a July 26 TikTok. “All body types matter. All body types are worthy, from the smallest gymnast to the tallest volleyball player, from a rugby player to a shot-putter to a sprinter. All body types are beautiful and can do amazing things.”

And when it comes to anonymous body-shamers, Maher had the perfect mic drop. “I do have a BMI of 30. I am considered overweight,” she said in her first video. “But alas, I’m going to the Olympics — and you’re not.”

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