“The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.” Article unfortunately doesn’t give the freaking formula for chrissakes; it’s “364.2 − 365.5 × √(1 − [waist circumference in centimeters / 2π]2 / [0.5 × height in centimeters]2), according to the formula developed by Thomas et al.10”
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yeah, been weightlifting for years, and the only time the BMI chart says I’m “healthy” is when I’m at my absolute shreddiest. Looking like I’m starving myself to shoot a nude scene in a movie. And I hate that. I know that when I’m at that weight, I may look great, but I’m also at my weakest. So I hate that this chart subconsciously bullies me into trying to maintain some ridiculous 9-12% body fat range, when that’s more of a body building competition range.
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Explain that to the insurance company, that seems to be the relevant problem here.
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You can use the BFP Calculator helps you understand your health status beyond simple weight measurements.
Unlike BMI calculators, BFP Calculator provides a more accurate assessment of your body composition by considering age and gender factors.
BMI is not a medical metric. Here is an article explaining that. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-02/the-problem-with-the-body-mass-index-bmi/100728416
Says I’m 10%. BMI says I’m 22.5. I think that’s a big difference? I’m very tall, thin, but have solid muscle and work out about two hours per day.
Wonder if I’m doing it wrong? I have an athletic build similar to a soccer player, surfer, etc.
It puts me in the average range but close to obese. I have a six pack LOL.
I’m interested in other people’s experience with the tool.
Are you sure you’ve put in your actual waist measurement and not your hips? The ‘waist’ on most pants nowadays sits at or below the hip line and is therefore gonna be fairly wider than your waist. If you look up a graphic it should make sense
I found a website that said your waist is halfway between your bottom rib and the top of your hip. That was pretty close to my belly button. Got anywhere from 34" to 36" using a metal measuring tape, which could have been part of the issue. But 6’2" with 34" waist should be considered thin, right?
At 198cm (6’6") and 111kg (245lbs) BMI states that I’m on the high end of “overweight”. My waist is 96cm (38"), which makes my RFM “average”. I like that better.
Replacing BMI with BMI2 is fine, but it’s doesn’t change the fact that most Americans are overweight or obese, and the tiny, tiny sliver of people who have a high BMI from weightlifting are insignificant relative to the ~70% that are just plain fat
There’s also a lot of people who had essential muscles replaced with fat, thus evading the overweight designation while having an imminent risk of diabetes. This reflects that.
Help me out here. What’s BMI2 - searching gives me computer related stuff and running “BMI weight” just gives old BMI stuff.
They’re just calling this new thing BMI2 as shorthand
Oh, ok. Thank-you.
Yay, I’m a tiny sliver!
Here’s an online calculator
Thank-you.
I’m from the UK and grew up in the seventies. I can’t do metric or imperial without help!
Hmm, that puts me at BRI of 2.1, and BMI of 35.4
Those both seem incredibly off.
But I do have extra dense bones apparently, which tends to be mostly what screws with my BMI, and my ability to float/swim. But they seem really hard to break, not that I try very hard… but none of them have broken yet. And I’ve been in situations that seem like they should have broken.
Either way, I weigh alot more than I look like I should, not quite “Wolverine getting on a motorbike”, but a bit like that.
Kinda makes me wish those “guess your weight” carnival experts were something I could see in real life, only ever seen it on TV.
It’s incorrect, it claims my body fat is 19% when I know for an absolute fact it’s 22%.
Much better estimate than BMI innit?
I think interestingly enough it’s inaccurate in the other direction. While BMI is will call people unhealthy if they have a lot of muscles, this will call people healthy if they are like me severely underweight.
My roundness index claims it’s in the healthy zone while in reality my weight is unhealthy.
How do you know you’re unhealthy?
I’m currently receiving treatment for onset osteoporosis caused by malnutrition. Also it’s kinda obvious your weight is probably not healthy when your ribs are sticking out.
looking it up, BRI ranges from 1 to 16, but somehow there isn’t an accepted definition of underweight
Height selection on metric side has jumps of up to 3 centimeters lmao. Makes me doubtful about the accuracy since I’ve never before seen that
I’m also pretty skinny and it says my BMI and body fat is great but that I’m too round. I don’t even have belly and it is showing me as quite rotund lol. I think there’s something fucky going on with my measurements or about inputting metric into the calculator.
E: Tried it again and now I’m out of healthy zone for being too lean. Hmm. I’m not sure if I measured wrong or they’re saying I should have a bit of a belly. Which is the sort of medical advice I actually want lol
Height selection on metric side has jumps of up to 3 centimeters lmao.
Too lazy to look, but given 1 inch = 2.54 cm, my guess is the tool is written in inches, and just rounds those values to the nearest whole cm, thus alternating between 2 & 3 cm increments.
Don’t Americans deal with differences smaller than 1 inch when it comes to height, is it just 2 footies 7 incherinos? I’m so used to it being per cm.
Tbh I’ve never before seen a dropdown selector for height before either. It’s always just fill in thing.
Maybe to a half inch, but it’s not super popular (except for kids who ALWAYS are proud of that half inch they grew in x period of time). At least, that was the case before I moved to the sanity of metricland.
They don’t. At most just 1/4 inch sometimes.
Partial inches are only used by people insecure about their height. “I’m 5’7.25” “, naw bud, you’re 5’7”.
I was thinking that this was a bit like with age. Someone telling you online that they’re “25 and a half”, yeah I bet you are lol.
But to me 3cm difference especially in this sort of calculations just seems surprisingly big.
In imperial, it’s in one-inch increments, which is typical. Must have been written in inches and translated for the rest of the world.
The wikipedia page has a calculator that supports metric more properly
This is giving me body fat percentages that are around double what I get from other methods. Not sure what’s up, but I don’t really believe my 5’8" 150lb ass is 30% body fat
We’re the same height and weight and I got 22%. No. Way.
That’s normal.
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I went from Anorexia in the military to getting out and doing calisthenics for years now. I am quite a bit smaller than average. Usually between 13-17%, primarily using Navy Body Fat measurement scale to determine it.
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How come there’s a metric button that doesn’t work?
Worked for me.
Drag tried on mobile and PC. Every time drag clicked metric, it reloaded and switched back to imperial.
Why are you referring to yourself in the third person?
Drag isn’t referring to dragself in the third person. Drag is using drag’s first person neopronouns.
As a separate person, Drag is not Dragonfucker but concurs that Drag pronouns make Drag sound very cool, and Drag would like to adopt Drag’s neopronouns for Dragself as well.
Awesome, drag is glad Drag likes them.
It “works” for me, but if you want to put in xxx in CM, it might not be there because they stick to inches and you need to round up/down :/ For example, it goes 170cm to 173cm
Waist to height is the only proven metric. And the problem with BMI is not that it is overestimating fat, it’s that it’s underestimating fat because it completely misses skinny-fat people, and the number of those is much higher than the number of jacked overweight not fat athletes.
Add to this the complicating factor that it’s really torso fat that is metabolically active and dangerous to your health.
Waist should be less than half your height, you don’t even need a measuring tape. Get someone to cut a string as long as you are tall, and see if it can go around your waist twice, with at least some extra length. If so, you are good, probably don’t have too much torso fat.
ETA I don’t understand why they need that complicated formula, why not just a ratio? The only inputs are waist and height. Never understood the point of squaring height to get BMI either, it’s also just a mass to height comparison, why not a simple ratio?
…people…have…waists…that’re…half their height‽‽‽‽
Circumference, not width
peopleofwalmart.com has entered the chat
people have wrists that are 1/6.28⋯ their height‽‽
That’s a strong wrist. Too much self-pleasure!
I’m a normal sized human.
72inches tall (6’) 32inch waist
I could easily see a fat dude having a 40 inch waist at 6’ tall.
Right, you are proportionate, waist to height as a measurement means a 7’ tall guy would be healthy with a 40" waist, but a lady (or man) who is 5’ tall really does need smaller than 30" to be in shape.
Oh shoot I conflated wrists with waist😭
6’ fat dude here… 46" I think… maybe only 44…
What if your torso is large because your large liver because alcoholism?
Now tell the doctors because as recently as this year one that I went to was talking about BMI.
It’s not doctors that need to know. It’s the insurance companies. They wrote the policies that pay doctors based on the BMI metric. Until those policy changes happen nothing will change.
Insurance companies quietly control so much and most people don’t realize it.
BMI has been antiquated for like 15+ years, so my guess is it’ll change when they die
Well, it turns out they both tell me I’m a little too fat.
Will this donut help me pass the body roundness test?
Donut is round, so definitely
I am a sphere.
Ready to ponder.
If you’re frictionless too, physicists will love you
Especially if he lives in a vacuum.
The hard part will be inelastic collisions
Can’t tell you how disappointed I am that isn’t just a chart of increasingly tubby kittens.
Lvl. 10: “oh lawd he comin’”
For all the time I’ve been told how bad BMI is, and how it classes top athletes as obese, I can’t help but notice how few of those people have the body of a top athlete.
I’m not a top athlete but I do lift weights and according to my BMI I’m .5 under overweight despite my body fat percentage staying in the 15-17 range. I’m not even that big.
I bike and rock climb, I walk long walks and overall in a good shape, not great, not terrible. When the doctors see my bmi without other metrics, they immediately tell me to lose weight and don’t take anything else seriously. I missed very serious illness because of that, every symptom I had was thrown into a pile of “your bmi is bad, lose weight”, until one doctor was smart enough to check on me for real.
BMI is incredibly oversimplified and gives lazy or overworked doctors easy way out of doing their jobs, which kills people.That’s an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I’m pretty fat, because I haven’t shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I’m visibly way larger than I was, I’m not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I’ve lost a heckton of muscle. It’s insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say “that’s the same picture”. Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.
That’s because BMI is actually pretty good as a screening tool. It’s easy, simple, and pretty damn accurate when combined with an eyeball test. To the extent that it misclassifies people it is far more likely to underclassify obesity than overclassify. The people complaining just don’t want to hear it.
not for the army
OH, come on, I have body close to some professional shot putters or hammer/discus throwers! /s
The problem is that it incentivizes fat over muscle.
Well it incentivises neither.
I’ll admit I was disappointed that I put on weight once I worked out a bit, but there’s still plenty of podge to go before I can blame BMI for me being slightly overweight.
It incentivizes fat because it is much lighter than muscle.
We ran into it a bunch in the Army. As well as the fat over abs phenomenon. Very few of our BMI failures were actually fat. The Army test was really problematic because they measure your waist and neck. So you’re simultaneously trying to lose belly fat, build neck muscle, and maintain energy levels for infantry training. Which is just a bit of a nightmare to be in. Meanwhile every week you’re running 30-35 miles, putting 15 hours in the gym, and doing 10 hours of field exercise, all on top of any infantry training.
I think it’s one of those things you either run into a lot or very little.
I mean, I work in IT. It’s hard to take a bunch of sweaty Humpty Dumpties seriously when they tell you the issues with BMI…
You lower it in the kitchen I think, regardless of your build. I think if you’re healthy, you know how much to pay attention to a single number.
Oh for sure. I proved that when I got out, stopped working out, and didn’t adjust my portion sizes. But the me that I am now, is all my fault and not anything to do with BMI measurement.
