At 6'1" BMI seems to say I should be between 140lbs and 185 lbs. I'm currently 165 lbs and feel pretty skinny -- I can't imagine being healthy at 140 lbs! The 185 seems about right -- I've been close to 180 lbs and felt like I could lose a few.
I’ve been in these two modes:
1) genuinely overweight with too much fat and not enough muscle
2) nearly overweight according to BMI while very fit, with low fat and high muscle. got here from the other state by exercising a lot, losing fat and gaining muscle.
I think I would have to become totally sedentary again to get rid of my muscle mass and actually reach the lower end of “normal weight” according to BMI, while starving myself and feeling feeble.
Not knowing you personally, it seems statistically more likely to me that your idea of "fit, low fat, high muscle" is what's at fault here (as opposed to BMI). Sure, you could be an exception. But all things being equal, you probably aren't. (Also maybe I misunderstand - if you mean that BMI was saying you were at the high end of normal then ... isn't that just saying that you're fine?)
(Of course if a medical professional or academic specializing in such matters also thought BMI was inaccurate in your case then I would tend to view things differently.)
In his prime he was considered overweight. BMI is way too simplistic for taller athletes.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/how-accurate-body-mass-i...
The claim is that BMI does not differentiate between body lean mass and body fat mass. Things like hydrostatic testing are more accurate for determining body fat mass.
It’s well understood that BMI is totally wrong for athletes or anyone remotely muscular.
I assure you that's not my motivation at all. I'm not an expert in that field so I tend to trust the metrics used by the health professionals I encounter.
> BMI is widely regarded as totally obsolete
That is not my impression at all, but again I'm not a subject matter expert here. If you have reliable (ie academic or medical) sources I would be interested in learning more about any current preferred metrics.
What do you have in mind? With a bit of searching I haven't found much that's cheap. (Obviously you can take some tape or caliper measurements to improve your numbers but that's neither new nor particularly accurate.)
First, there is a fundamental constrain that it measures impedance only through legs and a little bit of belly, but no upper body (at least here in .cz, no consumer-grade scales have hand electrodes). I do road cycling as the only sport, and therefore get extremely skewed results as I have strong legs, but the rest of the body is much weaker.
Second, the measurements are almost non-repeatable. You get tens of percent difference across measurements, god forbid if you suddenly have moist feet etc. However, both scales used firmware cheating to mask this noise: once you set up a "profile", it will remember the initial value, and then change the following measurements only slightly. However, set up a second profile (preferably with a slightly modified age etc. to prevent advanced firmware cheating) and you get completely different results.
It's imperfect, but generally correct. More importantly, it's easy to measure. Accurate except for outliers isn't as much of an issue as you think it is, especially as these are generally already accounted for by its users.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
If that is the case then the body type would have been low mass overall, like marathoners.
As for best body type for quality of life today (at least from a health perspective), that seems relatively aligned.
This seems like the real question to me; I assume pre-agrarian humans were biologically optimizing to survive famine. Not being an expert on the subject, I wonder what sort of tradeoffs are associated with intense exercise regimes (and how the balance ultimately comes out with respect to modern society).
Infant and child mortality is much much lower.
I am your height and when I was in my 20s, I think I was in the 140s, later I was a little over 200, and now I am just about 185. So the range makes sense to me, but I've never been far from completely sedentary. I know a pro sports player at ~200 would be very skinny. I think Mariano Rivera was an example.