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Who considered you obese? Also is it healthy to even have <5% body fat?
According to the BMI scale, over 30 is obese and 25 to 30 is overweight. I'm not sure of the health factors but if you're training for 2 - 2.5 hours a day and dieting it can be normalish. Why the down votes? Check the scales: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmic...
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BMI is a tool for doctors to use, along with clinical judgement. No doctor is going to look at a lean, well muscled individual and tell them they're at risk for heart disease because their BMI is high. BMI is something that fails in theory and works in practice.
I thought it was a tool for measuring large populations where the lean, well muscled outlier is heavily outnumbered/balanced out by their opposites. Either way though I agree that it's silly for individuals to try to apply it to themselves and then shit on the concept because it doesn't work like that.
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What's wrong with BMI for something like this? It's such a simple measure and it seems to be useful for predicting health issues. From what I've read body fat percentage is what really matters, but accurately calculating that takes expensive equipment. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/summer-of-sci... seems to indicate that BMI does a pretty good job, although it may be too generous on the high end.
>What's wrong with BMI for something like this? How many runners do you know who would complain about BMI? Or weight lifters? It's the fat people who don't like it.
Calipers are also $10 and measure body fat accurately enough for health purposes (body building may be an exception in this as well, but only in extreme cases).
Interesting article. I don't know that I'd take too much to heart given some of the obvious caveats the author has been nice enough to make explicit, but it sounds like I'd be hard pressed to argue the suggestions contained within. For the tl;dr crowd: - written by a physician - people often think that heart disease is controllable by our actions whereas they feel that cancer is not - > people can’t change many risk…
BMI combined with body fat percentage is still useful, and likely every single doctor knows when to ignore BMI.
This idea that there are doctors looking at bodybuilders and saying, "well this number here says you're obese, so you're obese!" is absurd.
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> This is much on my mind because I'm helping to raise funds for one such project right now After two paragraphs about how the only way to save yourself is to give generously? Ya don't say...
You see the argument for this approach to cancer as being less valid because in addition to making it, I have chosen to act on it? Strange thought process.
I wonder what the psychology behind believing heart disease is preventable vs cancer being unpreventable.
No deep psychology needed. With hearts, you open up and you see clogged arteries, for example. It doesn't get much simpler than "too much fat is bad for your heart". With cancer? It could be anything. And there are tons of different types, seemingly hitting all kinds of people, fat smokers and lean non-smoking vegans alike.
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BMI is a tool for doctors to use, along with clinical judgement. No doctor is going to look at a lean, well muscled individual and tell them they're at risk for heart disease because their BMI is high. BMI is something that fails in theory and works in practice.
when you record someone's BMI and it gets thrown in a spreadsheet as patient 123456 has BMI 23.5 the doctor is no longer looking at the patient. perhaps it's good enough, i don't claim to be able to evaluate the methodology of the study (and perhaps using BMI simply results in more skeptical results, by leaving healthy people out of the low risk group, which I'm fine with - not sure this is true though). it really wa…
The parent was saying BMI is not a good diagnostic tool for individuals, and it was good for populations.
You're not addressing that point. You're saying that populations don't consider people individually. Which is true.
But you haven't made an argument against the use of population wide BMI, which is the only case it's generally accepted as being valid for.
(I agree it's over recommended as a individual measure, or overrecommended without caveats. E.g. BMI + waistline, or BMI + strength test.)
This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"