BMI Charts

Grim, I never said I had zero fat. My fat free mass is 192. That would be my weight if I HAD zero fat.

I still don't understand how someone came to that number without a full body scan.

It's so "exact". Was it a mathematical equation of some sort that you can share?

Citizen Kim,

Here is a link to the caliper conversion chart.

https://www.accumeasurefitness.com/body-fat-measurement-char ts-for-men-and-women.html

Find your age down the left side and the number of mm pinched by the calipers across the top. The corresponding number is your percentage of fat. For example, if I am a 45 year old male (I'm not), who weighs 185 pounds, and is 5-5 tall. Let's say my caliper pinches 17 mm, then I have a 22.1% body fat. For a 45 year old male a "healthy" body fat percentage is between 11% to 22% putting our example at the top end of the "healthy" range. Now take that 5'-5" 185 pound male and plug him into a BMI chart and you can clearly see that he is considered "obese" with 31% body fat, a full 50% error in body fat measurement.

The other significant thing that renders the BMI chart useless is that it doesn't even allow for variances in GENDER. It is a universally accepted fact that women have higher body fat percentages than men of the exact same weight.

As Grimm correctly stated the use of calipers CAN be wildly incorrect if not done by a skilled and experienced professional. However, as I have also clearly shown, and correctly stated, the BMI chart is a joke, if not a travesty and should be ignored for very basic reasons that have nothing to do with the government sanctioned changes that occurred in 1998. However, the fact that those changes occurred show conclusively that the chart is NOT based on any given mathematical equation, as is commonly stated, but rather, on some kind of arbitrary, random, belief.

There may be more accurate ways of measuring body fat than calipers, but that isn't the point of my post. My point was to show the inaccuracies of the BMI chart, which I have done.

Just curious. You have lost your weight on a program that did not include weight loss surgery. Does your program exclude surgery as a tool, or is that your personal belief?

In order to lose weight after surgery, I needed to greatly change my way of eating. Losing weight quickly naturally gave me more energy and more desire to exercise. What I used to think of as hard work, I now think of as going to the gym to play.

I know people in real life who have lost excess weight through diet and exercise and have kept the weight off, mostly through exercise. For me, it was just so much easier when I no longer had any hunger and when the food that I did eat mostly was not absorbed.

At the time, I was working a twelve hour workday, whi*****luded frequent driving and flying time. I was usually away from home from Sunday night until Friday evening. I would work from 8:00 AM until 8:00 PM and then eat in a restaurant and try to find a place to exercise. It was either in a hotel gym or pool, or find a fitness center that stayed open all night.

On the weekends, I would fly home, clean house and catch up on laundry. I was not in a place where I could have dedicated myself to a program like you doing. Being overweight made it hard to keep up with what I needed to do and having to run through an airport was a nightmare.

Having surgery made the journey from obese to slim a quick and easy one for me. I would like to say that losing and maintenance were hard work, but that would not be true. In many ways I do know that I took the easy way out and had the surgery. I wish that I had been in a place to do it the way that you did.

White Dove, the clinic that I utilize offers both surgical and non-surgical solutions. I, alone, made the choice for the non-surgical track. I'm not trying to pooh pooh the surgical track nor those who choose it because there all kinds of good reasons to choose surgery. Personally I have known several people who had the surgery and ended up weighing many pounds more than before they had the surgery, and I was afraid that would be me as well, so I opted for the non-surgical track. Yes it will take longer to do what I'm doing, I probably still have about two years of earnest work yet to do, but I WILL get there.

As for the hunger pangs you alluded to that is something I've never experienced. For sure I had to change my eating habits, and our Nutritionist has helped me make those changes and keeps me on track with our monthly reviews of my food diary. As a extremely sedentary person I had to learn to exercise in a healthy manner, and our Exercise Physiologist pointed me in the right direction. All I did was take the ball I was given and ran with it. We have a basic gym at our clinic and I augment my routine there with a once per week sessions at our local Planet Fitness.

As for me being a troll, it was I who started this thread, and your dismissal of CDC findings of the inaccuracy of the BMI charts, makes you the troll, not me. The pushback you have provided is exactly the kind of pushback I KNEW was coming when I made my initial post.

I did not comment on the accuracy of the CDC findings nor did I even read that. I did not call you a troll. You have mixed me up with someone else.

Sorry white dove, of course I was alluding to Grimm. My bad.

I had calipers testing in the 1970's. What I disagree with was that I had gained 20 pounds and the person who did the testing said that I was fine because my bodyfat was so low. I feel much better when my BMI is between 23 and 25. At 157 and 5'2", I was at 28.5 BMI, but accepted that as normal because of that testing.

Everyone has their own way of determining what is right for them.

I know a very addicted Coca Cola drinker. I have seen him pack a cooler with four cans, just to make a run to pick up more cases at the gas station on the next road. Last year, he ended up in the hospital with blood sugar so high that he was disoriented and almost comatose. He came home from work and did not recognize his wife, so she called an ambulance.

It ended up that he was told he had to quit ingesting all those mountains of sugar. So he switched to Coke Zero. He lost 100 pounds and feels great. The rest of his diet was fine, but drinking gallons of Colke a day almost killed him.

The important thing is to do what works for you.

White Dove,

The fact that you believe he's doing fine because he drinks Coke Zero now instead of regular Coke tells me much. How about drinking water instead of the Coke. Your body doesn't need, or frankly want, Coke of any variety but it does need water. I used to have days like that where I drank 2 or 3 20 bottles of diet coke too, but not any more. In fact I'm now down to 12 ounces of pop per week. Instead I drink water. Guess what your friend would lose even more weight and feel significantly better if he would stop the pop altogether and substitute it with water. You can go ahead and ignore the CDC's admonition that the BMI charts shouldn't be used in determining what is and what isn't proper weight for any given individual, and you have clearly made you choice, but my choice is based pn medical FACT, not fiction.

Thank you all for playing.

He is 6'1" and 180 pounds and looks and feels great. I replaced my Coke Zero addiction with plain water. He might end up doing the same.