Fat wrists?
You’ve never seen a fat wrist?
I guess if you didn’t have bony wrists, like most people, you’d use the elbow measurement.
Not sure about the wrist measurement, but I did the elbow measurement - you put your arm out straight, palm up, then bend at the elbow, bringing your forearm up 90 degrees. Feel the two little bones sticking out at either side of your elbow? You measure between those - and you’d have to be seriously obese to have any fat covering those to any extent.
I registered as large in frame, normal BMI. (I could stand to lose 10-15 lbs and I’m working on it, but I am within the normal BMI range at 5’9", 165 - 24.36. I’ve been down to 22ish in the last few years.) I have my mother’s body frame. My father was always slim in frame, and my sister got his. She has no hips, while I’m hourglass-shaped. Push on the side of my hip and there’s pretty much no give; they can’t get narrower. My sister could stand behind me (we’re the same height) and be obscured, easily. Her shoulders are measurably narrower, hips narrower, everything.
I always tell people who give me that big-boned excuse:
“No, a brontosaurus is big boned, you’re a fat pig.”
But only to my good friends. 
If you paid any attention to my post you would realize how wrong you are. Please reconsider the idea that your body type represents the average person. People differ from each other in a myriad of ways, and if you can’t see that …
Never mind. You’re a waste of my time.
Maybe it varies by person, but my wrists don’t have fat on them; there’s skin over bone and not much else. Maybe I’m not overweight enough to have fat wrists. I need to lose about 25-30 pounds.
As for a larger frame obscuring weight gain or loss, that’s certainly true in my case. 5 pounds either way doesn’t seem to change how my clothes fit or how I look; I have to lose 10 before it gets noticeable.
I lost a little weight last year, and I now wear my watch two notches back. I have never been fat, and by no means could my wrist have been described that way, but it is slimmer now. I have seen wrists that could be described, unequivocally, as fat. These have all been very large people.
I am somewhat overweight and big-boned. I currently stand 6’0" and am somewhat overweight at 240. When I’m 220, I fit in size 34 jeans and start to show a six-pack.
I have two buddies who’s also 6’0", but when they’re 220, they have big old-man pot bellies and both of them only start looking really in shape down around 160lbs.
I wear a 46L suit. Both of them wear 38-40.
There is such a thing as frame size and it’s definitely distinct from being overweight. Frame size does not “excuse” being overweight, though–the only context in while “I’m big-boned, not fat” makes any legitimate sense is when comparing raw weights or BMI in a context divorced from frame size. That is, my doctor started telling me to eat more the one time I got down to about 170 (wrestling in high school), when the “normal” weight range for my height is listed at 134-180. Why? Because I’m big boned. Same as when I get told to ignore the BMI stuff because I’m relatively high in muscle mass–weight and height are not the only two statistics that describe a person, and weight alone is not an accurate predictor of what someone will look like.
I know a guy whose skeleton weighs 200 pounds. I’m taller than him. You’re pretty much 100% wrong here.
I’m pretty much the classic case of big boned. I’m tall and I have huge joints and wide shoulders. When I was growing up I went through a growth spurt that made me so thin you could see all my ribs and all the little bones in my spine, but I was wider than everyone else around me, and I weighed a lot more than anyone would expect.
My frame makes me look skinnier than I am; I’m probably 30 or 40 pounds overweight but no one would guess that from looking at me. So, my experience has been that being big boned makes it easier to look skinny.
Is there a medical term for this?
Peep this adorable-ass fat wrist.
I know that people are saying that mostly ‘big boned’ is used as a joke, but in my childhood, I remember it being used a lot, quite seriously. There would be children that could barely haul their butts around, and the adults would sit around saying, “You aint fat, baby. You just big boned…just like your mama.” Usually, these kids would be solid, or stocky, or tall or whatever, but they were all fat, and the big boned thing was only said to make them feel better about it. Which is fine, I guess, since not feeling better about themselves is not likely to make them lose weight…but it is still not true that their fatness was due to big bones.
If there was no such thing as big bones or small bones, there’d only be one size of shoe for men and one size of shoe for women.
Seeing as this is demonstrably not the case, there must be different sized bones.
Bone and subsequently skeleton size varies by the individual, as any physical anthropologist will tell you. Another question is how much mass does the difference in bone size account for? I’d say not that much. Bone volume doesn’t vary nearly as much as fat or even muscle volume. Big bones might add a couple pounds at best over a similarly tall, equal lean and fat mass, small-boned subject.
It’s not so much the weight of the bones that’s the issue, it’s the weight distribution the bones can support.
Like I said, “Big-boned” seems to me to be most sensibly applied to people who are just big, not necessarily fat. Again with myself as the example, I can say here “I’m 6’0” and 240 lbs, but I’m not fat–I’m big boned." because A) you can’t see me and B) I am essentially using “big boned” as shorthand for “I have a larger frame (in the ‘linebacker’ sense) and therefore proportionally carry more weight than average without being unhealthy”.
On the other hand, in real life, a clearly overweight person saying “I’m not fat, I’m big boned” is kinda kidding themselves.
On the other other hand, again in real life, the friends of a person obsessing about their weight (as compared to the average) more than their realistic appearance might say “You’re not fat, you’re big boned” as shorthand for “your frame is larger than average and you need to take that into account when assessing how good you look based solely on scale numbers.”