My recruiter is telling me he will mark me as 'not committed' for not losing weight and terminate my enlistment. is this a real thing?

Ok 1. The standard is the standard military wide. 2. Army will invest about $250k in your Basic/AIT training. 3. Money is tight, with little room to waste. 4. Almost 80% of our youth can't qualify for the service. 5. It's not the Army's responsibility to have you at the weight standard, it's yours. 6. You have had 90 days to start losing the weight and have failed. 7. YOU DO NOT MEET THE STANDARD SO YES, THE RECRUITER AND EVERY RECRUITER CAN REFUSE TO WASTE THE ARMY'S TIME AND MONEY ON YOU!

Actual, current recruiter here, not going to tell you about how it was in the 90s.

Look. Your recruiter is absolutely right. If you can't manage to lose 15 pounds in 3 months, which can easily be done in one month. Yes, you can easily be terminated, and he simply won't waste any more time on you. Because if you can't drop that, you're not committed, and he can focus his time on someone who actually is.

It's very, very frustrating to put in a lot of time and energy to someone who won't come close to matching it.

Actually at this point you are still classified as an “applicant”, you are not officially “enlisted”. That being said, your med reads are pretty much worthless if you do not meet the MEPS BMI standards. As for working with your recruiter for the past three months, he does not the the time to be contstantly focusing on you. He has to find, process, and enlist others to help meet his centers mission. So once you safely meet BMI standards he will focus on your next processing steps.