What are your thoughts on "ideal weight" charts?

They never take into account muscle mass or fat percentage.
Take them with a pinch of salt, just as you should with BMI.

I think they’re silly and outdated. My mother is built stocky and muscular and at her most healthy is about 20 pounds overweight according to those charts. I agree with cage. These charts should take into account muscle and fat percentage.

I like the idea of a healthy BMI range, except most BMI calculators don’t seem to make an allowance for men so they often call men over weight when they are perfectly healthy. The BMI on the Wii Fit thinks my hubby should be in the 150’s. That’s just crazy.

Depends on my weight at any particular moment.

The fittest man I know counts as badly overweight, verging on obese, by height/weight charts and BMI calculations. They’re nonsense.

this, like everything else that comes remotely handed down to us from the government (isn’t everything?) i am calling into question to at the moment. The relevancy and necessity of these things perplexes me…specifically when they are useless as already stated because they don’t take into account enough variables.

Boycott the BMI!!!
Eliminate the Ideal Weight Charts!!!!
Fight the Fibs not the FAT!!!

… but then…I am overweight…so i would say that ;-)

@lynneblundell are you saying it’s the governments fault you feel fat?
I agree, they’ve done some controlling things, but I don’t see what gain they would get out of making people feel overweight.

They’re just outdated systems.

not at all…. i’m the one who eats too much, drinks too much and smokes too much, i wouldn’t dream of blaming anyone else for that but I;m pretty sure they do have a motive somewhere along the line to keep people thin…and i’m not sure it not simply about another thing that they can make us feel inadequate about so that we will spend more money making ourselves look, feel and think better…and then there’s always…..pharmaceuticals?.

fascism.

my thoughts?

well i did notice that even my beloved runnersworld.com doesn’t give you a straight answer.

on their bmi calculator tool, they tell you 18.5 and above is “normal weight” and then three lines below that if your bmi is below 19.1, they consider you “unhealthy”. now, mine is in between those two numbers, and i will bet a million dollars there hasn’t been a cover model in the last year whose bmi is higher than mine. so what does that say?

@La_chica_gomela ; one thing it says is that cover models aren’t healthy! Wow, a 19 BMI, I can only imagine! I thought I was doing good around 24.

I know I always look and feel best when I’m 10–15 pounds heavier than the charts say I should be. I’m heavier than that now, and I’m working on losing it slowly and reasonably. But I know the healthy weight for me will never be the number on those charts.

What are my thoughts? First thing that comes to mind is how many people won’t date those who run afoul of the weight chart. I guess it makes you a bad or unattractive person if the numbers don’t add up right.

wow, i don’t think i had seen that thread before. girlofscience hates fat people. huh. i don’t think we would get along very well in real life. The majority of my close friends are overweight. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or there’s something to it, but it’s been true for just about my whole life.

edit: so that was pretty tangential…sorry.

What gets me about GOS’s response is that if she said the same thing in regards to other aspects of a person’s appearance, no one would canonize her for being brutally honest. What if she said “I hate black people, The sight of them repulses me and I can’t even stand to be friends with them,” would anyone have bothered to defend her?

I probably should have posted this in that thread, but I feel weird bringing up old threads and girlofscience seems scary.

@katawa, i can see both sides of that coin. on the one hand, they are both physical aspects of one’s body. on the other, race is completely different from being obese. for just one thing, the obese were never enslaved, beaten, hanged, ETC just because of that physical characteristic. one could argue that they are also persecuted, but it’s still not even vaguely close to the same thing.

also, i know what you mean, i feel like i’m gossiping behind someone’s back. and i started it. anyway, we should stop now.

edited by me. Posted to wrong question again uggh.

seems unevenly balanced