BMI misses more often in the other direction (skinny-fat), being fit and obese is much less common.
It’s my understanding that the only proven health metric with regard to size is waist to height. Your waist measurement less than half your height? Then you don’t have too much abdominal fat, and it’s the abdominal fat that is a bigger risk to your health.
It’s a general guideline that’s accurate for average people that live average lives, but if you’re too tall, too short, too muscled, have lower or higher bone density, etc it can be very inaccurate. No doctor takes any action on this alone, but it can be a guideline to ask you for blood works or other studies to ensure things are okay. There are better ways to measure body fat percentage, but that requires special instruments and also are usually dependent on where your body stores fat, so you might not have ever done them before.
Holy shit that’s wild. Is BMI good for anything, then? Or does it need abandoned?
BMI misses more often in the other direction (skinny-fat), being fit and obese is much less common.
It’s my understanding that the only proven health metric with regard to size is waist to height. Your waist measurement less than half your height? Then you don’t have too much abdominal fat, and it’s the abdominal fat that is a bigger risk to your health.
It’s a general guideline that’s accurate for average people that live average lives, but if you’re too tall, too short, too muscled, have lower or higher bone density, etc it can be very inaccurate. No doctor takes any action on this alone, but it can be a guideline to ask you for blood works or other studies to ensure things are okay. There are better ways to measure body fat percentage, but that requires special instruments and also are usually dependent on where your body stores fat, so you might not have ever done them before.