Hondo Gravel

Every time I go to the doctor their charts say I’m obese. I’m the thinnest obese person I know lol. Seriously if I weighed what the chart indicates I would be emaciated and sick! I admit I could lose about 10 pounds at the most and I would still be obese according to their charts. One doctor stated those charts are BS and they don’t go by them but calling me obese! Ok, rant over.

OBoile

How tall are you and what do you weigh? What chart are you referring to? A BMI chart?

rumrunn6

know what you mean. our Daughter recently lost a lot of weight for health reasons. Mom & are weren't happy but she looks gorgeous & is perfect according to the charts. In my opinion, an Italian girl ought to have a little more meat on those bones!

joelcool

Yep, I'm overweight too. 6'0, 188 lbs. Oh well.


It's my understanding that the BMI calculator is somewhat misleading for people with more muscle mass since muscle is more dense than fat. I got some muscles .

base2 

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/...ryId=106268439

I'm huuuugely obese with 14% body fat.
I wouldn't read anything into it unless you were one of the people in the original data set.

redlude97

What is your BF%? I find it a bit hard to believe that you fall into the obese category by over 10 lbs while still being considered thin unless you are a body builder.

hubcyclist

i'm 5'10 and 170 at the moment, bmi of 24.7, so just in the ideal range and BF at ~16% plus or minus a few fractions. I recently got myself a inexpensive smart scale (like 20 something on amazon and does bluetooth to an app and such).

I think most people would consider it crazy to call me overweight when I mention wanting to get back to 155 and around 12% BF like I had been for awhile. But I can certainly tell I'm carrying excess weight with such a doughy midsection. Anecdotally, I think higher weights are being normalized and good fitness is being called "too thin"

Seattle Forrest

Those smart scales don't actually measure body composition, fat percentage, or anything like that, FYI.

Hondo Gravel

I'm 5-10 muscular 200 pounds not fat. I lifted weights for years but I'm not a body builder. Not close to being obese and have 6,112 gravel miles in 2017. Maybe I'm just fat lol I just don't understand the strict guidlines of these healthy weight charts at 160 I would be sickly thin. I suppose I could set a 20 pound weight loss goal and see what happens.

pdlamb

I thought I was "fat but fit" until my heart attack.


O.P. may be a young female body builder with no heart disease in her family, and may have a fairly low body fat fraction, may exercise a lot, may have low blood pressure, may not have diabetes, may have an excellent blood lipid profile, may eat an excellent diet, may not smoke, etc. If all that's true, my only advice would be to watch all the possible risk factors, and when they start to change from the current excellent values (like getting older), it would be wise to start changing some of the modifiable risk factors and conditions.


Experience is a hard school, but this old fool would learn in no other. How about you?

Seattle Forrest

BMI does not apply to people who train for strength.

Most people in the modern world are sedentary. Most people don’t exercise voluntarily and desk jobs are generally replacing manual labor. Most people are not very muscular. Hence the “skinny fat” (medically obese at normal weight) phenomenon.

This is why BMI accurately describes most people. Because most people have a generally similar body composition.

Also, BMI is used because it’s cheap and dead simple to measure/calculate. Determining your body fat percentage with much accuracy requires calipers, a water test, a DEXA scan, or something else along these lines. You could go have any of these done if you like, but you can’t do that regularly with hundreds of millions of people.

bruce19

BMI is BS. Just ask any NFL running back who is 5'9" and 230 lbs and runs 40 yds in 4.4 sec.

redlude97

5'10" 200lbs makes you overweight, not obese according to BMI

joelcool

I've been curious to what my body fat % is. I lift weights 3-5 days per week, and have added quite a bit of upper body muscle over the years. I've never been able to quantify it though.


Lifting doesn't help my cycling at all, but I will continue doing both... not to compete in either, just because I enjoy both activities.

redlude97

Not really, here is what 5'10" at 162lbs with lots of muscle looks like based on googling.

Hondo Gravel

Thank you all for the responses I decided to eat a cleaner diet and go from there and not worry too much about it. I will be 50 in a few weeks so getting and staying in shape will take a better strategy than eating anything I want like I could 20+ years ago. It is just hard to pass on the cold beer and greasy delicious Mexican food we have in abundance down here in South Texas.

Machka 

Perhaps that's just because you can't actually imagine what you'd look like at a lighter weight. Sometimes perspective clouds things.

Try losing the 20 lbs and then reassess.

OBoile

One thing to keep in mind is that even if you're fit/muscular etc, carrying around extra weight is still a risk factor. Your heart still has to work harder, your joints are still absorbing more force with every step, your organs have to work harder etc. The fit/muscular person, as a result of all the exercise they did to achieve their state, is certainly better off than a sedentary fat person (and likely better than a sedentary thin person) but they are still at greater risk than a similarly active person who's body weight is in the normal range.

So, I don't think it's 100% correct to say the BMI doesn't apply to certain people. The key is to recognize that BMI is *a* number, not *the* number and should be considered along with a bunch of other stuff when determining one's health and potential health risks.

TimothyH

This is great post.

I was not aware of "medically obese at normal weight." It makes perfect sense.

Thank you.


-Tim-

canklecat

Depends on frame size and bones too. I'm 5'11" but have a slender frame and my optimal weight with minimal body fat would be around 150 lbs. That's the weight range I boxed as an amateur in my 20s, from welterweight to light middleweight.

At 60 now, I haven't grown in any significant way, just accumulated some body fat since then. I've been as heavy as 205 lbs after a car wreck in 2001 busted up my back and neck but I dropped it gradually when I regained some mobility. That weight sneaked up on me because it was so evenly distributed. In photos of my just wearing shorts I didn't look fat. It was remarkably deceptive and I had no idea how heavy I'd gotten until a medical checkup.

I was down to 175 by 2014 and after a couple of years back on the bicycle since 2015 my weight hovers around 160 lbs now. I look thin in clothes but still have some belly fat. So, strictly speaking, I'm still 10 lbs overweight.

Whether that's medically significant depends on my risk factors. On my father's side of the family there are risk factors for congestive heart failure and respiratory problems. And I've had asthma, bronchitis, etc., since childhood. On my mom's side there's a history of strokes, high blood pressure, Parkinson's and dementia (the latter possibly related to strokes and TIAs). Not much history of cancer, other than my dad who died of prostate cancer in his late 70s.

I do occasionally have moderately high blood pressure, with occasional spikes to 140/90 or higher. Usually its 120/70 or lower.

No idea about serum cholesterol, I haven't checked in years. I'm a bit skeptical about the whole relationship between a reasonable diet and cholesterol. I can't see that it made a bit of difference with my mom and her brother. Both did everything right with diet and cholesterol meds and still had high cholesterol and strokes. And my uncle had numerous angioplasties, etc.

On my father's side, they ate whatever they liked in great quantities and had no problems with cholesterol, strokes or plaque.

prairiepedaler

Has anyone here ever had a BMI impedance test done?

joelcool

This is something I haven't really thought about, but it does make some sense. I'm currently at 25.6 BMI, the recommendation for my height is 18.5 - 24.9 which equates to a weight range between 136 and 184. So I'm currently at 189. I've lost about 5 pounds recently, and have a goal of getting into the low 180s, maybe down as low as 175 before the weather gets nice so I can climb better . I honestly don't think I can get below 175 without loosing some of the bulk I've worked very hard to get. 136 is not something I can even imagine.

I get my blood pressure checked weekly so it will be interesting to see if the lower weight helps with that - it occasionally gets higher than I'd like.

I can definitely feel the difference from before I started lifting in terms of my joints absorbing more force, etc... and can buy into the extra work my heart has to do pumping blood to the extra cells I didn't used to have. I am working to get rid of the belly that has developed, no sense in hauling that around.

This has been good stuff for me to think about, and is prompting me to make some changes.

StanSeven

The impedience test is fairly accurate. Lots of things affect like like hydration at the time, though. I once had the hydrostatic immersion test done and skin calipers numerous times and there isn’t that much variation, at least for me.

Seattle Forrest

@OBoile is right, of course.

I'm right, too, but I'm painting with a pretty broad brush.

By and large the biggest health threats facing big people (as a group, we're talking averages here not individual destinies) today are diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stuff like that. These things are largely affected by body fat, not by weight. These are risks that a high BMI predicts, but people who train for strength or size are an exception. But as @OBoile rightly points out, that there are still a lot of health consequences that are a result of weight, regardless of how that weight is made up. Cyclists know that pretty intimately because we all face hills.

Seattle Forrest

The BMI calculation was invented in the 1800s, as a way to describe populations. (It was never meant to apply to individuals.)

Think of it like a bell curve. Of the people your height, you'll find a lot of variation in frame size etc, and among the entire group of people your height, 136 - 184 is predicted to be a healthy range. It doesn't mean you should be at the bottom or any specific place in that range.