Pleasantly plump people more likely to die earlier than thinner people

My partner has the same problem, he eats hiper-caloric foods all day and never gains weight. You need to eat more of what you NEED, not just more, and gain muscle mass. Muscle is heavier than fat. Sometimes it's not your body fat that's low, but your muscle mass. The BMI calculator is for mass, not fat, so it takes everything into account.

Fat or skinny, you need to fucking exercise.

your mom wrote:

Penguin wrote:

your mom wrote:

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

There's really no excuse for being underweight, you're most likely just underweight. eet moar

I eat all the time, everything I want, whenever I'm hungry, and I'm still underweight. 5'7", 110 pounds. (Sometimes goes down to 107, sometimes up to 112, but the most I've ever weighed is 115.) And I don't actually like being this skinny. But I DO NOT GAIN WEIGHT. I can sit and eat an entire pack of cookies in one sitting. Nothing.

I know a dude with a metabolism like that, and he hates it. He works out constantly and drinks all kinds of different mass-building shakes like they're water just to maintain a lean muscular build. He's pretty strong, but nowhere near where he wants to be.

I tried drinking those meal-replacement (Slim Fast, etc) shakes on top of everything else I'd normally eat for a while a couple years back, but it didn't really do anything. My doctor's never said anything to me about being underweight, and I've had 3 or 4 different ones, none of which have commented. But yeah, it does totally suck, it's probably not super healthy and I also hate looking this skinny, and I can believe that it must be just as hard for certain people with certain metabolisms to lose weight as it is for me to gain it.

Well, the only problem with those is that they're designed to be filling without too many things in them that will add weight. Something intended to supplement your diet with extra stuff would help a lot more. (This is why a lot of people with "normal" metabolisms who work out, but not often or intensely enough to justify protein shakes, only get fatter).

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

^
It's easier to be overweight according to BMI but still in healthy shape than it is to be underweight and healthy.

It's not necessarily straight up weight, it's what makes up the weight. At 6'0'' and 189 pounds, Wayne Gretzky has a BMI of 25.63. Dan Girardi at 6'2'' and 215 pounds has a BMI over 27.

These guys are/were NHL players, they're not in bad shape. It's just the muscle they have that normal people don't artificially inflates their BMI. And frankly, their biggest health concern is a rock hard puck and opposing defensemen.

There's really no excuse for being underweight, you're most likely just underweight. eet moar

Body fat % is a better way to go about it. The only problem is that the same person can test the body fat % of another individual twice in five minutes and get just slightly different results (like, a matter of tenths of a percent). While the BMI is a mathematical formula and you could do it 9001 times and get the same result.

Very good critiquing of BMI as a faulty statistic, Mikey, love. Well done!

I think I said it before, but it bears repeating: BMI is semi-useful as a statistical tool for looking at population health as it's dead easy to measure, but as a marker for individual health it's essentially useless. It doesn't take into account muscle, and it gets very distorted at extremes of height.

If you ever find yourself reading a paper about a diet or weight loss programme and they use BMI as their outcome measure, you can bet your arse it's dodgy as hell.