Fat Scores

I hate needlessly stupid systems.

You see, I am officially overweight. I don’t feel overweight, but I am.

These things are determined by a lovely calculation of a person’s Body Mass Index, or BMI. To figure this out, there are a ton of calculators on the web that will take your height, and weight, and spit out the number.

I am 5’9” tall, and weight 174.1 pounds.

My BMI is 25.7 which means overweight. A person who weighs the same as me and is 6 inches taller would be 21.8 and be normal, and a same weight person 6 inches smaller would score 30.8 and be obese.

For somebody my height to make it into the normal category, they would have to weigh in at 168.9 pounds.

This is crazy.

A typical day for me includes a 5 or 6km run, and several hours of Jiu-Jitsu training. I also walk a fair bit, and restrict my diet. My old knees don’t like any extra pounds, but they don’t complain at all when I manage to keep my bulk in the 173-175 pound range.

Fortunately, there is a better system out there for figuring this kind of thing out. This requires technology to do the calculations. Like anything, this used to be clumsy and expensive, but now devices like my bathroom scale do it on command.

This morning I was 22.9% fat. That rating puts me into the ideal range.

I consider this by far the more accurate measure. If I touch my body where bones are supposed to be near the surface, they are right there. My face is narrow, and does not carry any extra weight. All the non-measurement related indicators have me being more lean than fat.

To give some kind of comparison, Michael Phelps the Olympic champion swimmer was about 5% fat. The percent charts declare that he is Lean. Strangely, his BMI of 23.6 would rate him as Normal, and closer to being Overweight than to being Lean.

You may want to say, well, maybe he’s gotten chunky since his swimming days, but the figures I’ve used are from his swimming prime. He was pretty much one big muscle.

Let’s say that I considered Body Mass a good measure of health, and say that it scared me. I might keep doing all my regular stuff, but also start lifting weights, and might put on 30 pounds of muscle.

With no change whatsoever in the actual number of pounds of fat in my body, my Body Fat Percentage would have dropped from 22.9% down to 19.5% and have me scored at the very low end of the ideal range, and almost list me as lean.

Gaining those same identical 30 pounds of muscle would also change my BMI. I would go from my current 25.7 up to 30, and be considered obese.

BMI is trash, with its only positive characteristic being that it’s easy to calculate.

The damage it does is immense. It has people trying to plan their health strategies based on inaccurate information.

Attempts have been made to keep simplicity with modified systems that are more accurate. The best of these relates waist circumference with health issues. It is based on the assumption that it would be a good measure of how much fat is actually present in the body. However, like BMI it fails when considering two individuals of significantly varying general size, and if the goal is to investigate fat, why isn’t Body Fat Percentage used instead.

This is all a mystery to me, but what do I know? I’m simply a chap with an ideal amount of fat who is also overweight.