this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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collapse of the old society
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It's only a rough guideline. There's Olympic athletes that would be considered overweight based on their BMI that are basically all muscle. It's a decent guideline for your average person, but there's outliers that don't fit in that scale. After all, you're making a judgment based on just 2 parameters.
Nah, its off in a lot more ways. Bone density, it exaggerates tall peoples "fat"ness, and short peoples "thin"ness, racial differences, differences between the sexes, so on and so forth.
Its a 200 year old formula that's extremely generic. There are newer ones that are better, like waist to height ratio, hip and height, body comp, etc. Each one of those has some flaws too, but the waist to height is apparently pretty damn accurate. Way more than BMI. But it doesn't work for certain ethnicities, children, or people with medical conditions that would enlarge their waist.
My workout partner in college was clinically obese based on his BMI. He was like 6% body fat and had more than average muscle mass but was not huge. He was built like Hugh Jackman as Wolverine except shorter. There's lots of guys like that. Not sure I'd consider them to be extreme exceptions.