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Comment by greenwalls | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's just a coincidence that most athletes aren't overweight. It doesn't have anything to do with them exercising?

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If you can dedicate 8-12 hours a day to exercising, sure. It takes years of training to even be fit enough to do that, though. You can't be 100lbs overweight and out of shape and expect to be able to do that without injuring yourself.

Under one heading, the do specifically call out elite athletes, "whose job is exercising" as a potential exception.

It's also true that many endurance athletes are pretty careful about what they eat. My brother, who was a pretty good high school and college runner (5ks and 10ks especially), used to say he had a high body fat for a runner because he ate ice cream. His BMI? Maybe 20, 21 at most, and he was lifting weights back then.

Amusingly, if you go by BMI, quite a few pro athletes are overweight, or even obese. (This is a good illustration of how idiotic BMI can be...).

For instance, Michael Jordan was slightlu overweight according to BMI. Shaquille O'Neal was past overweight and into obese. Wilt Chamberlin was overweight.

Leaving basketball for boxing, Muhammad Ali was well into overweight. Mike Tyson was obese.

How about American Football? I'm going to exclude line positions since a large part of their job is to be a wall and so we'd expect them to go for mass. Quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana: overweight. In fact, five of the last six Heisman Trophy winners (who were all quarterbacks) are overweight, and one is obese. The last four non-quarterback Heisman winners were running backs, and two were overweight and two were obese.

so true, I've never been in better shape in my life, I recently ran ultra-marathon and can easily bench press my own weight 10 times but my physician told me I am overweight and should loose 15 pounds because my BMI is over 25. I wanted to take his head off.

I thought the same thing at first, but then I read this. We're talking us regular folks getting maybe an hour of exercise. If you're an athlete you're getting WAY WAY more so it makes sense that you're burning off calories like mad.

I also thought the same thing. The article didn't really address the point specifically, if you are highly active most of the day you will burn a substantial amount of calories. Some people maintain weight while consuming 4000+ calories per day, for example on long hiking trips or long distance running.

I'm not sure about the hunter gatherer example. That was interesting. Maybe they are in much better shape and can be active a large portion of the day without expending much more energy. Or simply, the activity isn't extremely high-level.

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