Off the scales.

"Five feet nine, 109 pounds or less," snaps a receptionist at the Ford modelling agency in New York City when asked for the average female fashion model's height and weight. That's 27 pounds under the lowest weight for a woman of the same height on the 1959 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MetLife) table, which from its publication has been the American standard followed by doctors, weight loss programs and even international airlines.

Some consider the 44-year-old chart's guidelines Draconian: By MetLife's 1959 reckoning, the ideal 5'11" man with the longest life expectancy weighed from 147 to 163 pounds; the ideal 5'4" woman, from 116 to 131. For people who go into shock comparing themselves to those numbers, there are plenty of other guidelines to follow, including MetLife's current chart, which was revised in 1983 and allows people to weigh an average of 20 pounds more. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the military, and Weight Watchers take their cues from this new table. The increase has some nutritionists up in arms, but others feel the old numbers are unrealistic for many people. Still others have no use for charts at all, stressing a healthy diet and exercise over conforming to standardized weights.

The 1959 table was derived from reports issued between 1935 and 1953 by 26 insurance companies in the United States and Canada. Analysts calculated the weights by averaging 4.9 million policy holders' life spans. For today's chart, a similar study was done on policies issued from 1950 to 1971. "Between the two periods covered by these studies, there have been substantial advances in public health and nutrition, as well as changes in lifestyle," states MetLife literature.

For Dr. Meir Stampher, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, those are fighting words. Along with the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public interest (CSPI) and the Philadelphia-based Nutri/System weight control company, he advocates sticking to the 1959 chart. "The lowest mortality rate is not where they say it is," he says of the adjusted table. "People who get sick often lose weight before they die, which makes being lean look bad." And in both studies, people with heart disease, cancer or diabetes were screened out to isolate the effect of weight on longevity -- a baffling omission according to the Cancer Prevention and Survival Fund. The Fund says that 30 to 60 percent of cancers are caused by dietary factors; it promotes a low-fat, vegetarian diet.

"What you end up with is a table that makes it look healthier to be fatter," Stampher says indignantly. "The people of `average weight' on the chart are really overweight." By the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports' reckoning, 24 million adults are considered obese (20 percent above desirable weight). That's 28.4 percent of America's adult population, or a 39 percent increase in obesity from 1966.

"You need to keep in mind that it's often difficult to translate for an individual based on these kinds of things," says Karen Miller-Kovach, a dietician in program development for Weight Watchers. "I think it's a matter of individual choice. It is not a food that makes you fat. You can eat virtually any food within a balanced diet. Maybe Americans don't balance as well as we could or we should, but I don't believe that we have to swear off certain foods to maintain a healthy body weight -- whatever that is."

Weight Watchers doesn't use a height and weight table, but does use the two measurements to compute their Body Mass Index (BMI), ending up with almost identical guidelines to MetLife. A BMI of 20 to 25 is healthiest, says Miller-Kovach. Do these numbers add up? One of E's staff is 5'10" and weighs 175 pounds, five pounds below the top of MetLife's current table; his BMI is 25. Because he works out regularly and looks very trim and muscular, no one could believe that he was so close, in this context, to being overweight. By 1959 standards he was 17 pounds over the highest weight for his height. With absurdities like that, raising the standards starts to make sense. Americans are just plain bigger than they used to be, and the increase isn't all fat.

Some critics say using a weight chart to determine health is simplistic at best because it doesn't take into account the body's fat content. The President's Council on Physical Fitness also notes that a person can be overweight according to the tables but have a body fat content which is average or even below average. "You can't tell every woman who is 5'6" that she has to weigh within a certain range of pounds," says Nancy Cianciulli, a director of operations management for Nutri/System. "It's the set-off for women being bulemic and anorexic. I've watched women really struggle to get down to chart weight."

She recognizes that Americans have gotten fatter across the board, though, observing, "You see a lot of women that look like Weebles [the egg-shaped toys] now." While the word and the image it conjures up are comical, large amounts of fat around the middle are no laughing matter.

Upper body obesity is a risk factor for heart disease, hypertension, stroke, high blood pressure and diabetes. Cianciulli blames this top-heavy silhouette on today's fast-paced, fast-food culture with its emphasis on high-fat meat and dairy products. "People are overbooked, they have no time, and they're lazy. They're running from Pizza Hut to McDonald's," she laments. In addition to health-related problems, there are environmental implications of such diets: water-polluting algae blooms caused by runoff from tons of cow manure at factory farms; 60 million tons of ozone-depleting methane belched by cattle every year; and the tremendous amounts of water and feed used by the beef and dairy industries.

"Our whole society is geared to promoting obesity -- on TV, through fast foods, through encouraging people to eat out, even through not providing sidewalks," says Michael Jacobson, the wiry executive director at CSPI, whose newsletter, Nutrition Action, recently published the MetLife 1959 weights as an ideal for good health. "The whole culture promotes calorie intake and not calorie burning. People like sitting around and eating."

Conforming to the 1995 (let alone the 1959) chart weight is difficult for many people, but some professionals' jobs depend on it. "When I was in the reserves, I saw somebody get fired who just couldn't make the weight standards," says a female civilian military technician who once self-administered an enema to help lose 11 pounds for a mandatory weigh-in.

Flight attendants have had similar problems. In 1989, members of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) went on strike against American Airlines over their MetLife-based weight standards. The union surveyed employees over 40 years old and counted many women suffering from bulemia, anorexia and diet-pill addiction. "To terminate and suspend people for not falling within those weights is unlawful," says Nancy Segal, an APFA attorney. "We have a class-action suit against United Airlines over weight guidelines."

"Those tables are full of holes because they've been standardized on white upper-middle-class males -- people who could afford to buy life insurance policies," says Dr. John Foreyt, director of Nutrition at the Nutrition Research Clinic at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "All of us can't meet certain standards." A person's metabolic rate, genes and biochemistry are all factors, he says. "The table should only be used as a guide. It's a better approach that we're eating healthy and exercising rather than to see whether we match up with a number or not."

Eating less protein than grains and vegetables and increasing the heart rate by exercising for at least 20 minutes three times a week is a simple strategy for maintaining good health. And as Dr. Foreyt says, "Get a life, focus on relationships, be happy. There's so much more to life than focusing on numbers."

CONTACTS: Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009-5728/[phone]; President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, 701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 250, Washington, DC 20004/[phone].