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Lumifer comments on Dunbar's Function - Less Wrong
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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".
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.