The poli sci prof at 6'0" 190 pounds IS 10 pounds overweight! He would had been at 175 pounds and NOT OVERWEIGHT 30 years ago. And the BMI chart readily admits its limitations that this hack conservative ignores so he can bash it. He tries to say its racist and aging population accounts for the epidemic of obseity, not true at all, particularly with the maps used.
shareI think you missed the point. When you see some show or that "other" movie about obesity, they show you a sequence of pictures of class 3 morbidly obese people. That's not the reality when quoting obesity levels by BMI, so they're essentially lying about it.
shareUsing height/ weight to determine BF is extremely inaccurate for anyone that actually exercises. It doesn't account for muscle mass.
Example: I'm 5'8" and almost 190lbs; 28% BF according to the BMI chart. Yet I'm able to do 70+ push-ups, 12 pull-ups and run 5 miles without keeling over.
As Penn would say, the BMI chart is *beep*
The problem with BMI is people ignore what it's designed to be. It's only useful to give the average person a rough starting point to determine their healthy weight. It gets stupid when they start creating statistics off of it and then want to create legislation based on those statistics.
shareThis is a good point. It's an "idiot" statistic (not meaning the person using it is an idiot, mind you, but in it's simplicity) that is simple to derive and in general (as you said when talking about the average person) gives a good direction to start from, but it's not particularly sound when trying to do anything beyond that.
shareThe BMI was never supposed to be applied to individuals at all, even the guy that designed it knew that, the purpose of BMI is to track changes at the population level. It's absolutely true that if you exercise without changes to your diet then you're more likely to probably increase your bmi rather than drop it. The BMI IS useful for the population level for instance it's unlikely that during the 80s and 90s there was a mass surge in amateur weightlifting across all ages and populations to explain the "obesity epidemic".
The other thing with BMI is that we know now that there are different kinds of body fat, some of it is beneficial (brown fat, lower body fat in women) and some of it is very unhealthy (fat around the organs). BMI makes no allowance for differing levels of these fats, a lot of pear shaped women actually damage their health and self esteem trying to lose that healthy lower body fat.
BMI chart is stupid when used alone. Finally tuned athletes are routinely considered overweight if not obese in terms of the BMI chart. Lebron James is 'overweight' and leaning towards level 1 obesity... right....
The BMI chart does not account for muscle mass or body fat %, which is a big problem. It was a chart made years ago and it shows.
That's true but it does give a reasonable range for an average person. The fine print says it doesn't apply well for athletes with high muscle mass or elderly people with low muscle mass. Doing an accurate body fat test with immersion is more than most people want to do.
shareMy husband's cardiologist uses it when he rebukes my husband. My husband isn't "BMI-obese," but it's probably a good rough estimate.
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