BMI = BS

The government tells us we have an obesity epidemic. Yet everywhere you look, people are not that fat. At least in my experience. Sure, you’ll see someone here and there. But in Vegas, where you’d expect it, and here in Washington and Oregon, people seem pretty fit to me. (Actually, people up here seem to be in really good shape. A lot of people bike).

This flickr series shows people classified as obese, just to show how absurd the BMI is. Like a lot of crisis the government clamors for new laws to solve, it’s a fabrication.

Well, obese may be an exaggeration though fat,
heavy, and significantly overweight certainly fit too many folks.

I’m between my “normal” jobs right now and am working in a C-Store. Let me tell you, there are one heck of a lot of hefty people coming in. And the females who are really need to show less skin. It’s gross.

Posted by  on  10/04  at  05:51 AM

If people want to grouse about obesity and try to get people to lose weight, I don’t much care—go for it.  But when they try to legislate it for whatever dumbass reason they can come up with, that’s where I draw the line.  My body is not the property of the state, thank you very much.

Posted by  on  10/04  at  11:58 AM

The BMI is garbage. It calculates “obesity” based on nothing more than height and weight. Without taking body fat percentage into account it is worthless. I am 6 feet tall, weigh 200 pounds, and I work out just about every day. My body fat percentage is 12%, but according to the BMI I am in the upper range of “overweight”, and should weigh 180. The whole outdated system needs to be scrapped.

Posted by Paul T  on  10/04  at  04:18 PM

Paul;
When I was 20 I was working as a mountain climbing instructor and was in the best shape of my life. I was not bulked up, just hard muscles.  I weighed 200, which, given my height, would have placed me solidly in the “overweight” category of the current BMI.  That amusing document wants me to be 185!  After my experience being penniless and starving in Japan, I briefly weighed 175. Pictures of the time show me as a grinning skull, and upon my return to the US my doctor actually treated me for malnutrition (“I don’t get a chance to do this very often,” he told me with glee.)  At 175 I’d be just barely into the “underweight” category, these days.
Bottom line: the current BMI, which has been revised down three times in the last 15 years, is nothing more that a club to smash people with and force legislative changes and socialized medicine down our throats.
I wonder what the current “epidemic of obesity” graphs would look like if one applied adjustments for the downward revisions of the BMI…?  Not anywhere near as alarming, I suspect.
I also find it interesting that while the usual suspects are blaming the fashion and advertising industries for anorexia and bulimia, they mysteriously don’t seem to feel the inexorable ratcheting down of the BMI and the constant pounding of it into the heads of kids has any negative effect at all.

Posted by  on  10/04  at  04:59 PM

Like second hand smoke, it’s nothing but a tool to push an agenda through.

Posted by  on  10/04  at  08:40 PM
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