HappySqurriel on 19 July 2012
| Aielyn said: *Sigh* - why must the media keep perpetuating the myth that BMI and fat are related? I have a BMI of 25, and I am less fat than quite a few people who would have a BMI closer to 20. I'm not hugely muscular, but I do work out, and have put on a decent amount of muscle mass. My fat levels have been dropping even more, recently, and yet my weight hasn't really moved. Body fat percentage is informative. BMI is more a predictor of your body type than of your body fat. A so-called "ectomorph" might have a BMI of around 18 and still be relatively fat. |
I don't think anyone who understands BMI uses it as a measure of healthy you are, just as a relative measure of how big you are. It ends up being used as a proxy for how fit/fat you are primarily because of how difficult and expensive it is to measure body fat percentages accurately.
This is also the reason why waist to hip ratio is the new measure that is rapidly growing in popularity in health circles. If you take someone's BMI and their waist to hip ratio you can come up with a fairly good approximation of how "fat" they are with measurements which are (relatively) easy to take accurately.
