Originally Posted by
Gear_Admiral
I do not know if I am remebering wrong or if standards changed, but obese (I thought) meant 20 lbs overweight. The CDC places it at more than 30 lbs overweight for the 5'9" male, which is pretty damn high. Fat is really light. It floats in water. A single pound of fat is a lot more volume than you would imagine it to be.
The key word here is 'over'. For at 100lb male, 20lb of fat is 20% bodyfat. Normal is around 15%. So he would be 5lb overweight.
But for a 200lb male, 20lb of fat is 10% and that's lean perhaps on the verge of underweight.
We are assuming non-body builders who target 5% body fat.
Now let's say we have a 150lb male. Normal bodyfat content should be around 15%. That would make his body fat around 22.5lb and his muscle mass, organs and bones to be 127.5lb.
For another guy with 127.5lb bone, organs and muscle mass but 20lb overweight, he would be 170lb with 42.5lb of bodyfat. That's 25% bodyfat on the verge of obesity. 30lb overweight would make him 180lbs with 29% bodyfat.
There are many methods of measuring bodyfat but the most accurate would be weighting the subject underwater to capture the weight of muscle, organs and bone only and subtract that from the total bodyweight from a normal scale..
These numbers are for illustrated purposes. In reality, they are in ranges which depend on the individual and interpretation by his doctor.