I was thinking of a comment in another thread where someone said that men think women should weight about 115 pounds. It reminds me of a screensaver I have for the movie Blade Trinity. This screensaver gives the weight and height of the cast as part of their vital statistics. It claims that Jessica Beil is 5’8" (which is true) and weighed 115 pounds.
Could a person be underweight - a person 5’8" and 115 pounds has a BMI of 17.5 and underweight is below 18.5 - have muscles like she clearly does, particularly in the last photo?
I think so. I’m 5’6", 130 pounds . . . but without false modesty, almost none of that is fat. I’m sure I could lose 16 pounds of muscle, putting me just under 18.5 BMI, and still be pretty muscular.
Very low bodyfat will make anyone appear much more muscular than they’d look with average, let alone high BF percentage and the same muscle mass. This phenomenon is widely known in the BB realm, where guys losing 30 lbs. of weight (some of it muscle) look way more impressive than before.
As to Biel weighing 115 lbs., there’s no way to verify that. She may just as well weigh 20 lbs. more.
In that last photo, she’s not particularly muscular, even though she has pretty good definition. But at 5’8", I sincerely doubt she can look like that at 115 lbs unless her frame is much narrower than I think it is.
I’m the same height as Jessica Biel and back in the day I weighed around 115 and looked similar to that.
FWIW, BMI is very useful for discussing populations, but can fail miserably when discussing individuals (ask any body builder). A BMI of 17.5 on a 22 year old (which is how old JB was whe the movie was made) is not necessarily underweight, so much as youthful slimness.
Conversly, I’ve been about that size and shape in recent memory and wieghed more than 115. I think that as you get older you get denser. Or something.
My partner is extremely tall and thin, with very low bodyfat. I’m sure that by “normal” standards he’s underweight for his height. He’s also very strong; but his muscles are long and well-defined, rather than bulging. When we work out together I’m constantly amazed at what he can do.
Absolutely. Female athletes in particular have to watch out lest their body fat get too low and they stop menstruating. That can happen while you have plenty of muscle mass, because the estrogen required for menstruation is stored in fat, not muscle. Not enough fat means too little estrogen to make the ovulation cycle begin.
At least, I’d consider anyone with too little body fat to menstruate to be “underweight”, no matter what the scale or their muscle mass/definition shows.
