I Tried to Weigh My Boobs

You know when they ask you to put in your height and your weight so they can determine your BMI?

Well, when I do it, it says something I’m not particularly happy with.

Now, I am a woman of small frame. I’m not huge. I’m 5 foot 2 — or 158 centimetres, depending on how you look at these things. My pant size tells one story.

My upper circumference tells an entirely different one.

Which is also why, when somebody approaches me in a lingerie shop wielding a tape measure, it ranks somewhere among my greatest nightmares.

Because while the rest of me is relatively small, there is — how shall I put this? — a substantial amount of infrastructure up top.

And this got me thinking.

Why is my BMI saying one thing when my pant size is saying another?

More importantly: how much do my boobs actually weigh?

Hence, I decided to weigh them.

As you do.

Turns out, weighing your boobs is not nearly as easy as you might think.

There are apparently a couple of ways of doing this. One involves taking a frankly unreasonable number of measurements — under the rib cage, over the rib cage, across various other bits of geography — and at some point a ruler becomes involved.

I started looking at the instructions.

No.

There had to be another way.

And then I discovered water displacement.

Now, if you remember Home Economics, I’ve just told you roughly what age group I belong to without actually telling you my age.

Remember Home Economics?

When they used to teach us useful things at school? Cooking. Sewing. How not to poison people. Possibly budgeting. And, somewhere along the way, water displacement.

For anyone who doesn’t remember — or who is young enough to be wondering why the hell school was teaching us how to displace water — the principle is beautifully simple.

You fill a container with water to a known level. You put an object into the water. The water level rises. The amount it rises tells you the volume of the object.

Archimedes apparently figured this out while getting into a bath.

I, several thousand years later, was standing in my house contemplating applying the same principle to my left breast.

Science has come a long way.

And yet, here we are.

So, How Does One Weigh a Boob?

Not easily.

First, there is equipment.

You need a bowl. It can theoretically be any size bowl, although obviously there are practical considerations here. You fill said bowl right to the brim with water.

Then you need another vessel to catch the displaced water.

And it needs to be a vessel you trust. This is science.

Then comes the slightly more complicated matter of positioning.

You need a platform low enough that you can actually put said breast into the water without also introducing other parts of your anatomy into the experiment. Because then we’re measuring things we weren’t intending to measure, and frankly the entire scientific integrity of the operation is compromised.

So, do we use a harness?

I don’t know.

A sex swing, some might suggest. I wouldn’t know anything about those. I’ve just read about them.

But, scientifically speaking, probably not a terrible idea.

A hang-gliding harness could work. Some other form of suspension apparatus. The engineering possibilities are considerable.

Let’s just say a harness was involved.

That’s all I’m prepared to disclose at this time.

Once everything is appropriately positioned —( and I’m deliberately leaving quite a lot to your imagination here ) — said breast is lowered into the bowl.

Water is displaced.

The displaced water runs over the edge and into your trusted vessel.

You then take that water and pour it into something you can actually measure.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, one millilitre of water weighs approximately one gram.

(Not millimetre. Millilitre. We are measuring volume here. I may be weighing my boobs in a harness over a bowl of water, but there are still scientific standards.)

And that, dear reader, is how I figured out approximately how much my boobs weigh.

And no.

I am not telling you.

Because you don’t need to know. Lets just say — my BMI calculation is a happy thing now.