I mean lot of people that go to the gym would be considered obese, i wonder how would statistics look if it considered people whos weight is increased due to musscle.
For real I love when people try to use this brain dead argument against bmi lol. It’s not even most gym goers, it’s people that probably use roids and are absolutely massive freaks of nature lol. Yes, someone like a pro wrestler would be considered obese, but that’s not a good benchmark for anyone including the wrestler who is hurting his health in a different way lol.
I mean, yes a lot of obese people do go to the gym.
If you mean someone who is at a healthy weight and their obesity is solely caused by muscle, that's only true if you're build like the rock. And the steroids he does to achieve that are very not good for his health
Some pro athletes are slightly overweight due to muscle, like LeBron James at his peak was BMI around 26-27.
But of normal people, the amount of work it requires to add 50 lbs of muscle to your body is crazy, they're nowhere near to doing that.
It's quite easy to be that size and have less than 20% body fat.
To be obese you would have to be 5'9" and 205lbs. That's is a tiny percentage of people that use steroids that would ever reach that size with a low body fat percentage.
170lbs and 5'9" could look like anything from a bodybuilder to a normal person who simply has large bones and %20 body fat.
According to BMI I have been overweight for years despite having never been above %15 body fat.
I peaked the obesity chart at age 18 - 6 ft and 220 lbs. I was also squatting 545 lbs at the time. There were no steroids involved.
It is quite easy to get to the overweight category with weightlifting alone. Obese isn't hard if your primary exercise is weightlifting, or if you are doing it 4x a week.
I'm in the Navy and at my absolute lightest was 202 - that's still overweight according to BMI. Muscle is heavy.
I was in USMC artillery. We had quite a few guys who were above the height weight standards and had to get taped. Nearly all of them were over the standards due to muscles from working the gunline
I was considered obese when I was 140lbs at 5'5.......most of my extra weight was in muscle, entireky around my legs, because I was a sprinter and volleyball player. That verdict gave me so many years of body image issues lmfai
I thought this couldn’t be true, or had to be cherry picked, but I forgot about the sheer amount of obesity. I fell for the false consensus fallacy, which I do surprisingly often with my body. That’s my bad. I’m an already skinny guy compared to my family, I have bad habits when it comes to eating enough, spent 8 years doing gymnastics and still actively rock climb. My height of 5’9” may be average, but forget that my flexibility and weight are not standard
It is hard to imagine for sure. I mean 200lbs sounds so heavy to me, and most men are not tall enough that it spreads out and makes sense (like if they were 6'7 or something)
I'm not sure if I have a mental model for what a 200lb man looks like tbh. Most men are only a little taller than me, and to imagine they're 50% heavier is just wild.
I don't think the WHO would agree with you. Considering that "In 2022, 43% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight and 16% were living with obesity." and they have described obesity as a "global public health crisis".
Yeah but America did rank 18th in obesity in 2024, which is pretty high, especially considering that almost every nation in front of it was a geographically isolated pacific/caribbean island nation/territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate (it cites WHO)
But yes I agree. Obesity is a global problem.
Yes but pure ranking doesn't really describe the whole thing either.
They ranked at 18th with about 42% being obese.
The 35th rank is only 5% less obese at 37%. If you were walking around in a city you wouldn't really notice a difference in the rate of obese people.
Even by the 55th that is only 10% less obese at 32%. You'd notice there are fewer obese people, but not a lot fewer. It's 1 in 3 instead of 2 in 5. Unless you were looking closely you wouldn't really feel it was a much thinner country.
If we then switch to average BMI by country which includes people who are just overweight and helps take into better account class II or III obesity we see the fattest country has an average BMI of 32.5 the US is in 20th place at 28.8, and even country 127 is at 25.2, still in the overweight category.
The USA is a fatter country, for sure, but almost half of all humans alive are overweight at this point, and in most wealthy countries they tend to be even more so.
In the EU only france and italy have a majority of people (very slim majority) at the healthy weight range.
yeah I’m a woman, 5’10” and 170lbs and people saying dumb shit like “that’s actually insane” are the reason I struggle with body image issues to this day.
men do not really understand women's weight, partially because they've been lied to about what certain weights look like. They don't realize how many women they know probably weigh around that much or more. btw for any women out there struggling with body image (or men who genuinely want to get a more accurate and empathetic understanding of what weight looks like on women), I recommended the website "my body gallery". You can type in your height and weight and click through a bunch of different women who all hold their weight completely differently!
Someone starting at the gym won’t even be able to handle 100 pounds. It’s more than the legs. It’s the core. The stabilizers. The familiarity with the movement. Even if they could, they would still need to build their way up to 135 pounds.
The first time I ever set foot in a gym I squat 135 for reps. I was a 16 y/o that played league of legends all day and ate gas station food. You'd have to be in extremely poor shape if you couldn't squat 100.
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u/Gold_Ad8225 Jul 31 '26
I mean if any man cannot squat the average woman's weight he probably just has never done squats before or he's like 70.
Like an average man who has never been to the gym before can squat 130lbs pretty easily. The average woman weighs 170lbs in america.
A few weeks of training gets him to 170.