“The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.” Article unfortunately doesn’t give the freaking formula for chrissakes; it’s “364.2 − 365.5 × √(1 − [waist circumference in centimeters / 2π]2 / [0.5 × height in centimeters]2), according to the formula developed by Thomas et al.10”
Waist to height is the only proven metric. And the problem with BMI is not that it is overestimating fat, it’s that it’s underestimating fat because it completely misses skinny-fat people, and the number of those is much higher than the number of jacked overweight not fat athletes.
Add to this the complicating factor that it’s really torso fat that is metabolically active and dangerous to your health.
Waist should be less than half your height, you don’t even need a measuring tape. Get someone to cut a string as long as you are tall, and see if it can go around your waist twice, with at least some extra length. If so, you are good, probably don’t have too much torso fat.
…people…have…waists…that’re…half their height‽‽‽‽
Circumference, not width
people have wrists that are 1/6.14… their height‽‽
That’s a strong wrist. Too much self-pleasure!
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Wonder if I’m doing it wrong? I have an athletic build similar to a soccer player, surfer, etc.
It puts me in the average range but close to obese. I have a six pack LOL.
I’m interested in other people’s experience with the tool.
Says I’m 10%. BMI says I’m 22.5. I think that’s a big difference? I’m very tall, thin, but have solid muscle and work out about two hours per day.
Now tell the doctors because as recently as this year one that I went to was talking about BMI.
It’s not doctors that need to know. It’s the insurance companies. They wrote the policies that pay doctors based on the BMI metric. Until those policy changes happen nothing will change.
Insurance companies quietly control so much and most people don’t realize it.
BMI has been antiquated for like 15+ years, so my guess is it’ll change when they die
For all the time I’ve been told how bad BMI is, and how it classes top athletes as obese, I can’t help but notice how few of those people have the body of a top athlete.
That’s because BMI is actually pretty good as a screening tool. It’s easy, simple, and pretty damn accurate when combined with an eyeball test. To the extent that it misclassifies people it is far more likely to underclassify obesity than overclassify. The people complaining just don’t want to hear it.
not for the army
I bike and rock climb, I walk long walks and overall in a good shape, not great, not terrible. When the doctors see my bmi without other metrics, they immediately tell me to lose weight and don’t take anything else seriously. I missed very serious illness because of that, every symptom I had was thrown into a pile of “your bmi is bad, lose weight”, until one doctor was smart enough to check on me for real.
BMI is incredibly oversimplified and gives lazy or overworked doctors easy way out of doing their jobs, which kills people.That’s an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I’m pretty fat, because I haven’t shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I’m visibly way larger than I was, I’m not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I’ve lost a heckton of muscle. It’s insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say “that’s the same picture”. Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.
We ran into it a bunch in the Army. As well as the fat over abs phenomenon. Very few of our BMI failures were actually fat. The Army test was really problematic because they measure your waist and neck. So you’re simultaneously trying to lose belly fat, build neck muscle, and maintain energy levels for infantry training. Which is just a bit of a nightmare to be in. Meanwhile every week you’re running 30-35 miles, putting 15 hours in the gym, and doing 10 hours of field exercise, all on top of any infantry training.
I think it’s one of those things you either run into a lot or very little.
I mean, I work in IT. It’s hard to take a bunch of sweaty Humpty Dumpties seriously when they tell you the issues with BMI…
You lower it in the kitchen I think, regardless of your build. I think if you’re healthy, you know how much to pay attention to a single number.
Oh for sure. I proved that when I got out, stopped working out, and didn’t adjust my portion sizes. But the me that I am now, is all my fault and not anything to do with BMI measurement.
I’m not a top athlete but I do lift weights and according to my BMI I’m .5 under overweight despite my body fat percentage staying in the 15-17 range. I’m not even that big.
The problem is that it incentivizes fat over muscle.
Well it incentivises neither.
I’ll admit I was disappointed that I put on weight once I worked out a bit, but there’s still plenty of podge to go before I can blame BMI for me being slightly overweight.
It incentivizes fat because it is much lighter than muscle.
OH, come on, I have body close to some professional shot putters or hammer/discus throwers! /s
Replacing BMI with BMI2 is fine, but it’s doesn’t change the fact that most Americans are overweight or obese, and the tiny, tiny sliver of people who have a high BMI from weightlifting are insignificant relative to the ~70% that are just plain fat
There’s also a lot of people who had essential muscles replaced with fat, thus evading the overweight designation while having an imminent risk of diabetes. This reflects that.
Help me out here. What’s BMI2 - searching gives me computer related stuff and running “BMI weight” just gives old BMI stuff.
They’re just calling this new thing BMI2 as shorthand
Oh, ok. Thank-you.
Yay, I’m a tiny sliver!
I am a sphere.
Ready to ponder.
If you’re frictionless too, physicists will love you
Especially if he lives in a vacuum.
The hard part will be inelastic collisions
Seems like a good idea. Whenever I’m actively bodybuilding, my BMI is always shown as obese, and my weight shown as overweight, despite the fact that I’m 12% body fat. It’s annoying, especially if it has an impact on things like insurance costs.
yeah, been weightlifting for years, and the only time the BMI chart says I’m “healthy” is when I’m at my absolute shreddiest. Looking like I’m starving myself to shoot a nude scene in a movie. And I hate that. I know that when I’m at that weight, I may look great, but I’m also at my weakest. So I hate that this chart subconsciously bullies me into trying to maintain some ridiculous 9-12% body fat range, when that’s more of a body building competition range.
I’m guessing you’re a female? 9-12% definitely isn’t a healthy long-term fat percentage for women. Personally I think women look better with a little more padding anyways.
Explain that to the insurance company, that seems to be the relevant problem here.
It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.
That’s like blaming the ruler for labeling you too short or too tall… Can’t we just use the tool for rough assessment, while being aware of its limitations, and be happy about it?
Look at it this way, BMI is a cross section of weight and height. I was considered “overweight” for ages because I just had tree trunk thighs from hiking and weightlifting. Like, less than 16% body fat but told I’m ‘overweight’ every time I got weighed.
The ruler was fucking wrong.
Nowadays, I’m much more of a fat fuck so the ruler is right now but only just so… I’m still under 25% when using hydrostatic!
i think you’re taking that quote out of context a bit. a few sentences later, the article says
Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.
“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.
so the point they seem to be making is that, while BMI is controversial partly because people like to shoot the messenger, it’s also just not a reliable measurement in a medical context, even as a heuristic. the article also goes into more detail on its other shortcomings as well. the article also indicates how BMI was never intended to be used in a medical context. so, there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting a new metric.
but i do think the sentence you quoted isn’t really doing the author any favors in terms of trying to communicate the central point of the article.
Seems like a lot of the flaws just have to do with the fact that the real metrics you want to use, which would probably be body fat percentage, are hard to measure accurately at home.
Or just make a better ruler?
my main beef is that “too fat” is a wildly varying scale from person to person because everyone stores and processes fat differently. and if you’re “too fat” that may not in fact be your most relevant health concern. my experience with health providers that focus on BMI during intake is that if you’re “overweight” many other health problems will be seen through that lens even if they’re unrelated… in my case, lots of dieting advice, being told to exercise more come to find out decades later I had an undiagnosed nervous/muscular condition. now that it’s treated somewhat, my weight stays pretty much in “normal” BMI with the same or lower activity. I’m kinda pissed it took this long to get treatment for an underlying condition because the ruler said “too fat.”
it’s easy to calculate but extremely rough. Efficacy varies immensely. Look, nobody’s forcing you to do anything, I’m just saying that BMI is way too rough to be seriously examined.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
Don’t skip scarf day
As an overweight 35 year old who wore skinny jeans: I feel this.
BMI is the best measure we have for statistical purposes (i.e., a population) because it’s been around for 50(?) years and is what is often used in studies, so you can compare one study to another using BMI.
It’s also not terrible for a population because it averages out. But for an individual it is definitely not a good measure because there are way too many other variables that matter.
I think there is a better one, it’s called a mirror. I look at it every day and cry, but there is no question lol
100% this, plus it’s very easy to measure.
For individuals the tg/HDL ratio is promising as a great marker for insulin resistance (lower is better). But it requires a blood test, for academic purposes it’s also good because most checkup blood tests have these two markers recorded.
Yes! Thanks, I had started to mention that and ended up with a huge run on sentence and it didn’t make it through the editing process. 😅.
we publishing peer-reviewed comments with this one
Here’s an online calculator
It’s incorrect, it claims my body fat is 19% when I know for an absolute fact it’s 22%.
Height selection on metric side has jumps of up to 3 centimeters lmao. Makes me doubtful about the accuracy since I’ve never before seen that
I’m also pretty skinny and it says my BMI and body fat is great but that I’m too round. I don’t even have belly and it is showing me as quite rotund lol. I think there’s something fucky going on with my measurements or about inputting metric into the calculator.
E: Tried it again and now I’m out of healthy zone for being too lean. Hmm. I’m not sure if I measured wrong or they’re saying I should have a bit of a belly. Which is the sort of medical advice I actually want lol
The wikipedia page has a calculator that supports metric more properly
Height selection on metric side has jumps of up to 3 centimeters lmao.
Too lazy to look, but given 1 inch = 2.54 cm, my guess is the tool is written in inches, and just rounds those values to the nearest whole cm, thus alternating between 2 & 3 cm increments.
Don’t Americans deal with differences smaller than 1 inch when it comes to height, is it just 2 footies 7 incherinos? I’m so used to it being per cm.
Tbh I’ve never before seen a dropdown selector for height before either. It’s always just fill in thing.
Maybe to a half inch, but it’s not super popular (except for kids who ALWAYS are proud of that half inch they grew in x period of time). At least, that was the case before I moved to the sanity of metricland.
They don’t. At most just 1/4 inch sometimes.
Partial inches are only used by people insecure about their height. “I’m 5’7.25” “, naw bud, you’re 5’7”.
I was thinking that this was a bit like with age. Someone telling you online that they’re “25 and a half”, yeah I bet you are lol.
But to me 3cm difference especially in this sort of calculations just seems surprisingly big.
In imperial, it’s in one-inch increments, which is typical. Must have been written in inches and translated for the rest of the world.
Thank-you.
I’m from the UK and grew up in the seventies. I can’t do metric or imperial without help!
How come there’s a metric button that doesn’t work?
It “works” for me, but if you want to put in xxx in CM, it might not be there because they stick to inches and you need to round up/down :/ For example, it goes 170cm to 173cm
Worked for me.
Drag tried on mobile and PC. Every time drag clicked metric, it reloaded and switched back to imperial.
This is giving me body fat percentages that are around double what I get from other methods. Not sure what’s up, but I don’t really believe my 5’8" 150lb ass is 30% body fat
We’re the same height and weight and I got 22%. No. Way.
That’s normal.
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I went from Anorexia in the military to getting out and doing calisthenics for years now. I am quite a bit smaller than average. Usually between 13-17%, primarily using Navy Body Fat measurement scale to determine it.
Hmm, that puts me at BRI of 2.1, and BMI of 35.4
Those both seem incredibly off.
But I do have extra dense bones apparently, which tends to be mostly what screws with my BMI, and my ability to float/swim. But they seem really hard to break, not that I try very hard… but none of them have broken yet. And I’ve been in situations that seem like they should have broken.
Either way, I weigh alot more than I look like I should, not quite “Wolverine getting on a motorbike”, but a bit like that.
Kinda makes me wish those “guess your weight” carnival experts were something I could see in real life, only ever seen it on TV.
Can’t tell you how disappointed I am that isn’t just a chart of increasingly tubby kittens.
Lvl. 10: “oh lawd he comin’”
Interesting. Found a calculator and according to this I’m “very lean” (only just) while I’m overweight (again, only just) using BMI.
Judging by the belly fat I can pinch, I’m gonna trust the BMI
Wikipedia has a chart:
I would be healthier if I were 1.4m.
Good to see it as a chart but that is different to the results it returns
I can I get your height? Gotta be 2.2m
Not the same person, but in my case I’m 182cm and my waist is 76cm. If I were 40cm shorter I’d actually (barely) be in the green area!
For all waists < 85cm, 1.4m would be the best height.
This is fascinating because I got a BRI of 1.9 and it’s saying I’m in the healthy zone. So I don’t really know what to believe here
Yeah not sure how I feel about BRI. It’s telling me my BRI is fine, but I’m rounder than I’d like to be.
How round one wants to be is easily influenced by external factors like culture, though. I think slim bodies look sleek and beautiful, but it’s probably healthier to have a bit of fat in the right places (for times when your digestive system is on the fritz)
I like the effort for a body weight stat being more complete or useful for individuals, but my efforts measuring BRI came up kind of wack too :(. We decided it judged me too thin.
Be egg. It is the only way.
Link please? Looks more informative than the one in another comment
I used this one
BMI is not a medical metric. Here is an article explaining that. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-02/the-problem-with-the-body-mass-index-bmi/100728416
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