It’s a lot easier for men to stay within the healthy-ish BMI range, thanks to their inherent muscle.
Menopause does a number on cravings, metabolism, weight-loss and muscle retention, that I don’t think most men appreciate.
I’m female, 51, walk around 3 to 5 miles a day, 40 -60 lbs overweight, watching my weight since I became overweight 35 years ago.
I’ve had many 19 years with a BMI under 25, and 32 years with a BMI over 25. I haven’t had a BMI of 25 since a 8 week window in 2014, when I was trying to get another number down. Current BMI is 30- 30.5, depending on that day’s weight and whether the nurse thinks I measure 166.5, 167 or 168 cm on that particular scale.
The 30.5 puts it in the next BMI danger zone, 30 and up.
It’s like rolling a rock up that same hill every friggin day.
That’s the only non-alcoholic beer I’ve found that I truly like. DH has experimented with some craft NA IPA’s and likes some but since I don’t like IPA’s, the NA ones don’t appeal to me, either.
Every year around this time we have birds fluttering against the windows on that side of the house. I have read they see their own reflection and think there’s an interloper or they see a reflection of some places that would make a nice best.
Like this YouTube video (not mine)
Sometimes we end up hanging something so they are less confused.
It remains baffling and yet really not so surprising how much BMI is clung to by lay people and some doctors alike as a meaningful metric of anything but itself. As one of your posted articles is bound to have pointed out, this was the creation of a statistician working only with white European men.
And for those championing this (or the idea that fatness is a disease or automatically unhealthy) because their doctor (and I’ll bet a white cismale one at that) said so: it’s like you’ve never considered that people within the medical establishment are people who hold biases. (It is particularly interesting to see how those in higher weight bodies have particular issues attributed to their body size whilst thinner people with the same diseases or conditions do not have their bodies given the same fault. In those cases, it just happened…) Plus, the failure to see how telling people to lose weight before they can receive medical attention is bound to exacerbate any health issue just does my head in. There is such cruelty and illogic in anti-fat bias, it’s exhausting.
This is my attitude and has been for a while-- GenX here since that seems to be part of the conversation.
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
336
Yeah, but just a tool.
I read some of the articles about BMI that Natascha linked and it seems the biggest problem with BMI is when it gets used like a sledgehammer without thought, often in making judgments or as a gatekeeper (e.g., not a good candidate for knee replacement due to BMI being over X). But some people groups on average carry a higher fatty tissue to lean ratio at a given weight (and so should be considered obese at lower BMIs), while other people groups carry a lower fat/lean ratio and should only be considered obese at higher BMI.
Then within groups, you’ll always have individuals who are lean but might calc a high BMI; athletes, weight lifter types, etc.
Here’s a decent quote from one of the opinion pieces linked - the one that used “unethical” in the title, although the author mentioned some of the problems he never really got around to the sheer unethicalness of it. But he also indicated a cheap substitute he said works well in indicating overweight but with less uncertainty - use impedance testing instead of calculating BMI from mass/squared height.
The point clearly is that a ‘high’ BMI does not always indicate obesity, and we should expect clinicians to use their common sense.
I don’t care too much one way or another, but definitely agree a tool like BMI should not be used without the doc (or the patient) engaging the brain.
Japan has something called the “Metabo Law”, a government-mandated waistline of 85 cm for women and 90 cm for men or face the consequences.
At one point local governments and doctors were pretty strict in enforcing it. My doctor saw how I was making a herculean effort to lose weight and didn’t push me too much or report me. But when there were abnormalities in urine testing (in my case, protein in my urine), the local health department did push me to work harder to drink more water and exercise.
BTW, almost every home scale in Japan will measure your body fat percentage, muscle mass percentage and estimated age. I miss those scales which were only about USD $20.00
Japan (and to be honest, many other countries) has laws that would never be even thought of as possible in many western countries.
The consequences of this were to be put on a diet. In Japan, if you are a full time worker, half of the premiums for national health insurance are paid for by your employer and therefore they can have say in how you manage your health. For the last 13 years of my 15 years in Japan, I was basically either self-employed or a part timer so I paid all of my premiums and no one had a say in how I managed my health.
Bluebird through my window 
…Oh! Johnny I’m ti-red!
