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Comment by goosinmouse | Hacker News Reader

I will note that my BMI is 25 and i have a 6 pack. It's not perfect and really is just a rough guide. But i guess its a moot point since bodybuilders are already aware of that.

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Yeah, BMI doesn't work well if you have a ton of muscle, but it's a simple measure that works well in 90% of cases.

If you know that BMI isn't accurate, you probably already know what you need to do about yours.

It also doesn't work if you're at all far outside of the average height. This is fine for population level statistics (which is what BMI is for) but not for individual health measures. If I were to be on the lower end of "healthy" BMI I would be severely malnourished.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "works", but to my untrained eye BMI doesn't work especially well for individuals in general. It was designed to measure large populations using routinely collected statistical data, not to inform individual lifestyle and medical decisions. These days we have much more effective methods to evaluate metabolic and cardiovascular health instead of using a metric that's a proxy of a proxy, but calculating BMI and applying a (largely arbitrary) label is dirt-cheap by comparison to all of those; it requires no special expertise, expensive equipment, time-consuming procedure, or thoughtful analysis.

Yeah, best way is to just get a dexa, lots of places offer them and they're very affordable.

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