If I’m overweight by those standards, it makes me skeptical of articles like this, and sometimes I even question the validity of the entire obesity epidemic.
Anyone who knows their bodyfat percentage doesn't need to be concerned about BMI. They already have better information.
BMI is just something healthcare providers can do quickly in an office, or people at home, to get a general idea of what is going on.
At 12%, you are the exception.
For a male 12% is an athletic level of body fat, with ideal being (depending on who you ask) 16-20%.
12% is an extraordinarily low, and rare, for a male in the US in 2022. You are either genetically gifted, have a very, VERY, good diet, or are otherwise athletic.
The obesity epidemic is extremely real. The average body fat percentage for American males today is somewhere between 26-30%.
Of course, it may also be the case that you are very young. No child should have a bodyfat percentage higher than 16% with an "ideal" bodyfat percentage for an 18 year old being <10%.
Even back in the days before obesity engulfed the US, you would have been very rare.
During WWII, adult males being underweight was a very serious problem.
At 5'8", 165lbs, and 12% body fat with the amount of lean muscle you possess if you had been drafted into service you would have automatically been steered towards commando/airborne forces as an extremely fit person, whereas most other males were scrawny wrecks the army was worried about bulking up to get ready for combat.
The average weight for a serviceman in WWII was ~145lbs, so you have 20 lbs more muscle than a typical inductee in 1942.
I rock climb or ski 3 times a week for exercise. That’s it. I’m definitely not the most fit in my friend group by a long shot, but yeah it’s a fairly active social group.
Also I’m 40 years old.
That puts you in top 1-2% of most physically active people in the world. The rest of us dreads the thought of exercising 3 times a week :)
I'm 37 and I cannot find people my age who consistently do anything physically demanding apart from hiking. There are plenty of people who will do once a month cycling or something but no one who hits the gym three times a week.
You’ll meet people involved in a wide variety of mountain sports. The bulk is climbers, skiers, and mountain bikers but a lot of unlikely overlap in paragliders/BASE jumpers (want to hike further and higher) and kite surfers for some reason.
Based on your description, you are not overweight. The most concerning part of your comment however is that you would jump to question the entire obesity epidemic?
I mean seriously, just look around, particularly outside your own circles and where social deprestion exists in your town.
I don’t have a particularly abnormal body, which leads me to believe there is a large margin of error when measuring the number of overweight people.
“Looking around” and personally observing is wrought with bias. I’d prefer we use a more useful metric than BMI to get an accurate data on obesity.
The NYT looked at this and found that BMI is more likely to underestimate body fat than overestimate it. So while your experience is valid, when you look at the population as a whole, BMI tends to be a problem because it convinces unhealthy people that they're healthy rather than the other way around.
(That said, it's split by gender. Men are slightly more likely to be healthy with "overweight" BMIs than vice versa, but women are significantly more likely to have excess body fat at a "healthy" BMI than vice versa.)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/summer-of-sc...
And it is correct.
It is extremely, very, no-good bad to have excess body fat and if you are a 72” tall male who is not physically active that is where you should be.
Of course, for athletes, BMI is not relevant but those people are edge cases not worthy of discussion when you it comes to BMI.
The fact that people think it is unreasonable shows how perceptions on weight have been warped over the last 20-40 years.
At 6” tall and 140lbs you probably would have been the target audience for the “pack on some beefcake muscle with Joe Rock’s muscleman workout” ads in the back of comic books and magazines. But you would have been healthy.
The median weight of a 72” tall college-aged male in the 1950s was 167lbs. Almost exactly in the middle of the “healthy” BMI range.
With a fairly inactive lifestyle, I would still only be able to get to ~150 by losing all my body fat. 100%.
The final ten pounds would have to come out of muscle, organ, or bone. It doesn't sound healthy.
Also, I have been around 140 lbs as an adult, many years ago, and it did immediately precede my hospitalization, although it wasn't exactly due to an eating disorder.
Official sources give 2% body fat as the minimum for men, but that also sounds a bit extreme.
>The median weight of a 72” tall college-aged male in the 1950s was 167lbs.
It's almost as though cigarettes and leaded gas had some positive effect...
That said, the range that BMI defines as overweight is 25-29, and your BMI is 25.1. So while, yes, you are technically overweight, it's by a tiny margin. And you are nowhere near being obese.
> sometimes I even question the validity of the entire obesity epidemic.
That is... unfortunate. You haven't just been the discoverer of the issues with BMI. They're very well known and talked about. The researchers studying things like the obesity epidemic obviously know about them.
Besides, as others have said, just look around. In most places it's not hard to see that many people are overweight or obese.
Everything I wrote above occurred to me 20 years ago, when I first learned about BMI as a teenager. It’s not like it happened yesterday. Although I don’t recall the obesity epidemic being a thing back then, probably because we were all preoccupied with 9/11 and the Iraq war. But I digress.
I now regret writing this post because the point I was trying to make apparently wasn’t conveyed well.
Let me try again:
I’m not overweight, but I could be a statistic in the overweight category because I qualify as such. This is a fact, and it’s true for every male with my same height and weight.
Furthermore, I’m nowhere near being fat. Like not even close. That means in the neighborhood of similar heights and weights, every male is also nowhere near being overweight. How statistically large of an error is that?
If we’re overestimating by 10%, is this still an “epidemic”? Or do we really have a normal distribution with a mean of “kinda pudgy, not unhealthy”, and all the really obese people a standard deviation or more away?
> Furthermore, I’m nowhere near being fat. Like not even close. That means in the neighborhood of similar heights and weights, every male is also nowhere near being overweight.
This is the part I disagree with. In the neighborhood of similar heights and weights, most males are overweight. I believe you are the outlier here. Though obviously I don't know you, so... I might be wrong?
As an anecdote, I'm 5'7" and 154 lbs, so I think I'm in your neighborhood of heights/weights. I'm considered just below being overweight... and while I'm certainly not huge or anything, I definitely consider myself to be a bit pudgier than I'd like. I'd say I'm at around 20% body fat right now (This is partially planned in my case since I was doing a bulk.) From what I see in my friend group, I'm definitely on the less-overweight side of things.
As you rightly point out, BMI isn't enough to convey all the information, and I'm guessing in your case it's getting it wrong, probably because you're more muscular than average. Again, I don't know you, I could be wrong, but for sure in my case it's closer-to-accurate than you make it seem and we're not that far apart in numbers.
how do ppl usually measure this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-energy_X-ray_absorptiom...