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Comment by wombat-man | Hacker News Reader

Are you maybe hoping for a metric of general healthiness? Measuring body fat accurately on your own is tough. Most people know their height and can find a scale to use so you can get a rough idea of what bucket you're in. It's good for most people. If you're working out and pretty athletic idk why you'd stress about your bmi being a little high.

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> If you're working out and pretty athletic idk why you'd stress about your bmi being a little high.

If you’re not working out and fat, BMI is still not a good descriptor of “how fat” or “how consequentially fat”.

And yet you’ll still get scientists mapping out correlations and then it’s a shitty analysis because it does not show what the study assumes.

sadly it's often misused. When there are things like BMI qualifications on medical interventions or where jobs have physical requirements.

I knew a guy who really wanted to join the fire service but couldn't meet the BMI requirements as he was in the 'obese' BMI bucket, In this case he was just very broad and very muscular (built like the colloquial brick shithouse). By their requirements jonah lomu would not have been able to join because he was 'obese'

please delete your comment for going against bmi = health/fitness orthodoxy

That's crazy. A lot of the firefighters I see are uh, fairly big people. The test should be the physical exam.

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