License, Registration And Weight, Please

It wasn't.

Women lied about their weight, and men lied about their height, as anyone who's ever tried computer dating could probably tell you. (Cornell University researchers found 52.6 percent of the men in their 2007 computer dating study boosted their height an inch or more and 64.1 percent of the women trimmed their weight by at least five pounds.)

"You might expect that," Ossiander said. "Considering what human nature is."

A quick search of the medical literature on PubMed finds the same is true around the world. The Japanese can't be trusted to report their height and weight accurately. British researchers use a "predictive equation" to mathematically correct for our fibs. And French researchers warn, "Self-reported weight and height should be treated with caution."

P. Willey, a physical anthropologist at California State University in Chico, wanted to know whether information on a driver's license could be used to help forensic researchers identify skeletal remains. He and a colleague, Tony Falsetti, studied college students, in the prime of life, and found nearly everyone fudged. "People tended to round to an even digit. Every male was six foot. Hardly anybody was 5-11. One fella overreported his stature by six inches. And with weight they rounded down to the nearest five to 10 pounds," he said. "I certainly have."

So what does a driver's license really tell you?

"That we're all very tall and very thin," Falsetti said. "Psychologists would have a field day. Why would someone, on this inconsequential document, a driver's license, want to distort their body image? I supposed because what we all want to be is a Swedish model." (Which is probably true even in Sweden, where a 2007 study of 1,703 Swedes by the Skaraborg Institute in Skovde found nearly everybody lied about their weight and height.)

So why have weight and height on a driver's license at all?

"In our field, human identification, we use it, so do medical examiners and coroners, as a 'guideline,' " Willey said, sounding a lot like Capt. Barbossa in "Pirates of the Caribbean" discussing the Pirate's Code. "It's often the only information they have. They can run it more easily than tracking down the next of kin, and the memory of how much a loved one weighed or how tall they were can be really off. So they just tap into driver's licenses as a general practice. It's easy. It's simple. They know we're all lying. But taking that into account, they can kind of start to sort things out."

So our driver's license info is really there on the off chance that our body ends up in a ravine and is left to rot?

"But hopefully, that's not going to happen to very many of us. Though I'm afraid in my business it happens to too many," Willey said. "We do use stature. But weight's tough. Especially if you've only got bones."

Falsetti suggested that maybe we measure ourselves because it's what we've always done.

"Before fingerprints came in at the turn of century, and I mean 1900, people would necessarily report things like height, weight, color of hair, complexion. Enlistment records for the U.S. Army included that information -- they didn't have photographs for each of these people in the 1870s -- so that, if they deserted, they'd at least have a general description of the person," Falsetti said. "I guess measurement is one of the things we physical anthropologists hold near and dear to our hearts, even though we know people lie on their driver's licenses."

Which got me wondering what they're going to do with the nationwide REAL ID cards that we're all supposed to have soon. But the answering machine for Darrell Williams, the guy listed in the Federal Register as the contact for the REAL ID program for the Department of Homeland Security, perhaps full of angry calls from the ACLU, wasn't taking any more messages. No one else I spoke to at DHS knew for sure whether officials plan to include weight on a national identity card.

Then I got sick.

After a mysterious gastrointestinal illness that lasted a month or so, I am happy to report that I am now closer to my driver's license weight than I have ever been in my life . . . for now.