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wedrifid comments on Dunbar's Function - Less Wrong
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Have you met any fat people?
I mean that in all seriousness: Talk to some fat people. If you are close enough to them, ask them why they are fat. The reasons they give will generally boil down to "I couldn't possibly meet the standards of our society, so why bother? It's easier to just eat whatever I want and never exercise."
People with healthy body image concepts are sometimes "overweight" (in BMI, etc.), but they are never really fat---they don't ever reach full morbid obesity. This is because they are concerned about their health, not how they appear to others.
The fat people I know don't appear to give a damn about “the standards of our society”. My morbidly obese grandmother (BMI around 40) does think “why bother? It's easier to just eat whatever I want and never exercise”, but she also thinks the same about lots of other things (e.g. she smokes over a pack of cigarettes a day, it's hard to convince her to wear a cast when she breaks a bone, etc. -- she appears to be just waiting to die), and my parents and my sister (BMIs all around 30) say “I'm not that fat -- look at grandma for instance” (and they also insist that I (BMI around 25) am absurdly skinny).
BMI. Those things are fun. If I spend enough time in the gym I can get myself up to "Obese".
Yeah, I weigh about the same as I did two years and a half ago, but I looked and felt much fatter back then. (OTOH none of the other people I mentioned in the grandparent exercise regularly, and anyway I only used the BMI because it was the quickest quantitative measure I could think of.)
Oh, I should clarify that my arguments were not meant to chastise you for using BMI. I don't have any problem with it in the way you use it; it looks like it falls under argument two but it's clear that you're using it as a rough signal of degrees of morbid obesity.
BMI assumes you are the normal semi-sedentary modern person. It's not meant to be used on serious athletes or weightlifters. For 95% plus of the population, BMI is a pretty accurate metric.
More importantly, BMI assumes you are of average height. Human weight doesn't actually scale by the square root of height, so BMI has a systemic bias for tall people (too high) and for short people (too low).
As far as I recall, BMI was designed as a tool to compare whole populations (where the height bias averages out) and people who created it explicitly said that it's not a good metric to evaluate individuals.
While it's true that BMI is a rough metric and gets rougher when you're dealing with unusual proportions or body compositions, those effects are often exaggerated. An athletic male of 6 feet 6 inches (99.8th percentile) and 210 pounds, which is about what you'd find in your average pro basketball player, would score as normal weight.
Too rough for my taste. Once your average pro basketball player adds 10 lbs of pure muscle and become 6'6'' at 220 lbs, BMI will declare him to be overweight.