YSK that there's a better index than the BMI to measure obesity called the Body Roundness Index

I think there is a better one, it's called a mirror. I look at it every day and cry, but there is no question lol

Don’t skip scarf day

As an overweight 35 year old who wore skinny jeans: I feel this.

How come there's a metric button that doesn't work?

Hmm, that puts me at BRI of 2.1, and BMI of 35.4

Those both seem incredibly off.

But I do have extra dense bones apparently, which tends to be mostly what screws with my BMI, and my ability to float/swim. But they seem really hard to break, not that I try very hard... but none of them have broken yet. And I've been in situations that seem like they should have broken.

Either way, I weigh alot more than I look like I should, not quite "Wolverine getting on a motorbike", but a bit like that.

Kinda makes me wish those "guess your weight" carnival experts were something I could see in real life, only ever seen it on TV.

Thank-you.

I'm from the UK and grew up in the seventies. I can't do metric or imperial without help!

It's incorrect, it claims my body fat is 19% when I know for an absolute fact it's 22%.

Lvl. 10: “oh lawd he comin’”

There's also a lot of people who had essential muscles replaced with fat, thus evading the overweight designation while having an imminent risk of diabetes. This reflects that.

Help me out here. What's BMI2 - searching gives me computer related stuff and running "BMI weight" just gives old BMI stuff.

Yay, I'm a tiny sliver!

...people...have...waists...that're...half their height‽‽‽‽

What if your torso is large because your large liver because alcoholism?

Look at it this way, BMI is a cross section of weight and height. I was considered "overweight" for ages because I just had tree trunk thighs from hiking and weightlifting. Like, less than 16% body fat but told I'm 'overweight' every time I got weighed.

The ruler was fucking wrong.

Nowadays, I'm much more of a fat fuck so the ruler is right now but only just so... I'm still under 25% when using hydrostatic!

i think you’re taking that quote out of context a bit. a few sentences later, the article says

Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.

“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.

so the point they seem to be making is that, while BMI is controversial partly because people like to shoot the messenger, it’s also just not a reliable measurement in a medical context, even as a heuristic. the article also goes into more detail on its other shortcomings as well. the article also indicates how BMI was never intended to be used in a medical context. so, there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting a new metric.

but i do think the sentence you quoted isn’t really doing the author any favors in terms of trying to communicate the central point of the article.

Or just make a better ruler?

my main beef is that "too fat" is a wildly varying scale from person to person because everyone stores and processes fat differently. and if you're "too fat" that may not in fact be your most relevant health concern. my experience with health providers that focus on BMI during intake is that if you're "overweight" many other health problems will be seen through that lens even if they're unrelated... in my case, lots of dieting advice, being told to exercise more come to find out decades later I had an undiagnosed nervous/muscular condition. now that it's treated somewhat, my weight stays pretty much in "normal" BMI with the same or lower activity. I'm kinda pissed it took this long to get treatment for an underlying condition because the ruler said "too fat."

it’s easy to calculate but extremely rough. Efficacy varies immensely. Look, nobody’s forcing you to do anything, I’m just saying that BMI is way too rough to be seriously examined.

That's because BMI is actually pretty good as a screening tool. It's easy, simple, and pretty damn accurate when combined with an eyeball test. To the extent that it misclassifies people it is far more likely to underclassify obesity than overclassify. The people complaining just don't want to hear it.

That's an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I'm pretty fat, because I haven't shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I'm visibly way larger than I was, I'm not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I've lost a heckton of muscle. It's insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say "that's the same picture". Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.

We ran into it a bunch in the Army. As well as the fat over abs phenomenon. Very few of our BMI failures were actually fat. The Army test was really problematic because they measure your waist and neck. So you're simultaneously trying to lose belly fat, build neck muscle, and maintain energy levels for infantry training. Which is just a bit of a nightmare to be in. Meanwhile every week you're running 30-35 miles, putting 15 hours in the gym, and doing 10 hours of field exercise, all on top of any infantry training.

I think it's one of those things you either run into a lot or very little.

I bike and rock climb, I walk long walks and overall in a good shape, not great, not terrible. When the doctors see my bmi without other metrics, they immediately tell me to lose weight and don't take anything else seriously. I missed very serious illness because of that, every symptom I had was thrown into a pile of "your bmi is bad, lose weight", until one doctor was smart enough to check on me for real.
BMI is incredibly oversimplified and gives lazy or overworked doctors easy way out of doing their jobs, which kills people.

The problem is that it incentivizes fat over muscle.

I'm not a top athlete but I do lift weights and according to my BMI I'm .5 under overweight despite my body fat percentage staying in the 15-17 range. I'm not even that big.

OH, come on, I have body close to some professional shot putters or hammer/discus throwers! /s

Wikipedia has a chart:

I would be healthier if I were 1.4m.

Yeah not sure how I feel about BRI. It's telling me my BRI is fine, but I'm rounder than I'd like to be.

This is fascinating because I got a BRI of 1.9 and it's saying I'm in the healthy zone. So I don't really know what to believe here

Link please? Looks more informative than the one in another comment

If you're frictionless too, physicists will love you

Ready to ponder.

It's not doctors that need to know. It's the insurance companies. They wrote the policies that pay doctors based on the BMI metric. Until those policy changes happen nothing will change.

Insurance companies quietly control so much and most people don't realize it.

BMI has been antiquated for like 15+ years, so my guess is it'll change when they die

Donut is round, so definitely

Says I'm 10%. BMI says I'm 22.5. I think that's a big difference? I'm very tall, thin, but have solid muscle and work out about two hours per day.

Wonder if I'm doing it wrong? I have an athletic build similar to a soccer player, surfer, etc.

It puts me in the average range but close to obese. I have a six pack LOL.

I'm interested in other people's experience with the tool.

it’s a gift article bruh