BMI WTF?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/77367764@N00/1459907060/in/set-72157602199008819/


3 sisters, 1 overweight, 1 normal, 1 underweight. It's hard to tell the difference between "normal" and "underweight", in particular. It looked to me like the one in the center was the underweight one and the the one on the right was normal, but apparently that's not the case--I think it looked that way because you can sort of see what the middle one's legs look like, and not the one on the right's. (I think the one on the left, based on her height, is standing on something.)

This is part of a series of photos compiled to show how narrow the "normal" range is, how "normal" the "overweight" and "obese" people look, etc., by BMI skeptics.

Of course (and some people seem confused about this), just because aesthetically "overweight" looks normal to us, that doesn't mean that health-wise it's in the "normal" range. But still, it does show just how narrow the category for "normal" weight is.

But that doesn't mean that I'm NOT skeptical of the utility of BMI. Other measurements, such as waist size seems to be better indicators, but even with waist size--I have to wonder if fat/waist size is correlated with unhealthiness rather than causing unhealthiness. I'm not at all sure that we have enough studies/data to know whether the actual situation is that people are more likely to be fat if they have unhealthy habits like not eating fruits/veggies/whole grains and being sedentary--as well as problems with obtaining quality health care, and problems as a result of yo-yo dieting and extreme dieting followed by binges. (See here, both the article itself and the comments for more on that. I've been surfing around and looking at links related to the BMI page, if you can't guess. I've been wondering about whether it's not the fat but the stuff that usually leads to being fat that causes health problems for a while [mostly since seeing this article], but I didn't realize how many problems there often were with getting decent health care when someone's obese. Obviously it must vary a lot from doctor to doctor, because a few of the commenters' weights were around my top weight, and I haven't had the kind of problems they had.)

One of the stories in the comments, which was unfortunately not the worst situation described but was perhaps the most telling, as far as the problems in getting proper medical care that attitudes toward obesity can lead to, was this one:
On the flip side, though, I'm not saying that fat is NOT some of the cause of metabolic syndrome-type difficulties, and I can't dismiss out of hand the possibility that only a very narrow range of body weights is healthy. I think we just don't have enough information to answer those questions. I do think that, regardless of the answer, the importance of weight is overemphasized compared to exercise and eating a balanced diet (not just eating less of the same types of foods you were eating before, or eating the low-fat artificial-sweetener version of everything, but still not eating any more fruits, veggies, or whole grains). The New York Times article mentioned above even says we've long known it's better to be fit and fat than sedentary and thin, but you always hear about the "obesity epidemic" and not the "sendentariness epidemic". Yet obesity gets more space in public health discussions even though it seems less important than sedentariness in its importance to health, because it's more visible--literally. Exercise usually is talked about as a means to the end of combating obesity, and much more rarely talked about as an end in itself. I'd be willing to bet that this results in people trying to exercise to lose weight, not losing any weight, and figuring that if they didn't lose weight they might as well not bother to exercise. There should be more emphasis on the fact that exercise is good for you even if it doesn't end up affecting your weight.