Yes, thank you, I plan to. Pretty much everyone in my family, despite high cholesterol running rampant through both sides of the family tree, dies somewhere north of age 80.
I still think my sister is at greater health risk than I am, but the bloodwork does not reflect that at all.
So I guess we could say:
In my case that it’s probably the case, quite literally.
I am 5’2ish" and I can’t remember not being a D, DD at times. I will celebrate my next birthday by getting a reduction.
From what I’ve experienced, weight and excercise are not strongly related. What I mean by that is that working out doesn’t seem to make me any thinner - it just makes me stronger and healthier. What makes me thinner much more reliably is deliberate control of how much I eat (that is, dieting).
When I started my personal “get healthy now, you have a kid to live for, asshole” plan, it had three components:
Stop smoking;
Stop being so goddam fat; and
Stop being unhealthy and unathletic.
These three were not at all as compelmentary as I though they would be - as it turned out, I had to tackle each one seperately, since quitting smoking made me want to eat, and quitting eating (as much as i wanted) made exercise harder to do. So I took each step in turn - quit cold turkey, then after I was reasonably sure of the smoking thing, went on a crash diet (I now think a more gentle one would have been healthier, but I wanted to see results). I lost 50 pounds, went from over 240 to 190 (I’m a 6’ guy). That’s still “overweight” according to the BMI, but I can live with that.
Then I signed up with a gym, work out twice a week. Not really enough, but better than nothing. Now, I struggle all the time to keep the weight from creeping back up, and to keep up my interest in exercising. I’ll probably have to do that the rest of my life, which is mildly irritating (but much better than not being healthy).
The point is that weight is only tangentally related to fitness. Sure, if you are too fat to move, you aren’t going to be fit; but for most people, the two aren’t really all that strongly related - it is more how much you eat that dictates how big you are, than how much you do.
So are there any thin people who say that the BMI charts are faulty and shouldn’t be used, or is it only those who are overweight?
I know you didn’t mean this as offensive, but I put a heck of a lot of effort into balancing my calories and such to stay even at 250 (and creeping downward, but I’m more interested in getting my “linebacker” physique back from high school than I am in losing pounds for the sake of.) and I think it’s kind of funny that you imply I wouldn’t have any idea how many calories are in a cupcake or how much I burn when running.
Besides, I pretty much CAN eat a lot. When I hit 275 the other year, I crash-dieted to 1500 calories a day and was losing just about 5lbs/wk for a month, if that gives you some idea of my typical metabolism (for those of you doing the math, that works out (assuming I was told correctly that a fat pound is about 3500 calories) that my typical daily use is around 4000 calories). Yeah, unhealthy to diet that much but I went from a 38-40 waist size to a 34 in time for my wedding, you’d’ve done it too. =P
So yeah, I can have those dozen cupcakes. And still have lunch that day too. Anything else?
Meh, this thread at least has given me motivation to jog farther today (but not necessarily to lose weight).
It’s also short people, and tall people, and old women. And in some cases children. And some doctors.
I have no idea if the BMI is “accurate” or not - I was pretty darn sure I was fat when I weighed 240, BMI or no. 
I’ve actually seen a lot of people who are saying they need to loose a lot of weight according to the BMI charts who are really only 2 or 3 pounds overweight according to the BMI charts. Which is NOT obese on the BMI charts - just overweight.
You can choose to define “fat” how you want, but I think “overweight” on a BMI chart is not fat. Its “I could drop a few pounds.”
I’ve lost 95 pounds through diet and exercise since last April. I love the BMI charts because they give me something to say to all the rude people who ask me if I’m “done.” No, I say, according to BMI charts I’m still 5 pounds overweight. Shrug.
I’ve known a few - mostly, people who are very petite and technically “underweight” according to their BMI, but they don’t appear overly skinny. The ones who get told they’re anorexic when they’re just naturally really small people.
I guess I’m a weirdo, BMI works for me - I’m at the very top of the range for my BMI, and I’d like to lose 10-15 (more) lbs, and I’m small to medium framed. So at a happy weight for me, I’d be smack in the middle of my BMI range, as well.
Good for you. (I mean that.) No, I didn’t mean to be offensive. I only meant to point out, for the benefit of you or anyone else who might be reading, that exercise doesn’t necessarily burn as many calories as you might think. I have encountered many, many people who think that putting in an hour on the elliptical at the gym means that now they can have a milkshake and fries with lunch, even though the milkshake and fries are actually way more calories than they burned on the elliptical.
Didn’t know whether or not you were one of these people, and with your subsequent response I see that you are not.
I agree with Malthus’s post, which sort of fits in with this. I’m losing weight, and I’m becoming fit, and those two things are actually not that closely connected. The weight loss is coming from calorie management, and the fitness is coming from exercise. The exercise is certainly contributing to weight loss, because I’m burning more calories than I would otherwise. But if I weren’t managing my nutrition as well, I wouldn’t be losing much. I lost no weight for the entire first month that I started my running program.
I don’t exercise to lose weight. I exercise so that I can eat more.* 
Also, I read somewhere threat “we diet to look good in our clothes, and work out to look good naked”.
*I don’t do diets well, I enjoy food, so in addition to the health benefits, exercising vigorously allows me to lose weight while eating more than I would be able to if I only dieted. Math can be provided upon request.
I do tend to get defensive about it because my wife has a very slow metabolism, and one of my friends is perpetually weight training and a ridiculously fit 5’6" and 155lbs, and both of those lovely ladies have a tendency to make me feel guilty about the quantities I eat which are right for me but also usually more than both of them put together.
I also get shit from people for being the kind of guy who’ll eat one meal that’s my entire calorie allotment for the day if it’s a good restaurant. Or for skipping dinner and eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, or similar. =) The way I figure it, I am monitoring my blood pressure and cholesterol and get regular physicals, if I have any nutrition-related problems they are not currently on my doc’s radar, why not use up calories on stuff I enjoy now and again?
This is one of the fundamental points for anyone trying to get into shape OR lose weight–they’re really orthogonal unless you kill yourself with exercise.
People don’t seem to realize that BMI has nothing to do with how you look. It doesn’t stand for Beauty Mass Index. It’s an indicator to tell you if you have more fat than ideal.
Saying someone is “fat” is a subjective evaulation. Saying someone is “overweight” is a medical term. Overweight means you have a greater percentage of fat than you should. We have gotten accustomed to seeing larger people so we see that as normal. However, it’s actually healther to be leaner. You can’t trust your eyes to tell you what’s healthy.
Anyone who discounts their BMI numbers should get their body fat tested and see if the BMI is truly wrong. People often say things like “My BMI is 30, but I look fine.” That may be true, but you probably have a greater percentage of fat than you should.
And unless you do exercises that give you significant muscle mass, it’s not going to throw off the BMI that much. Tony Romo spends hours in the weight room, so it’s no surprise that his BMI number doesn’t match. But your average person who plays tennis, swims, runs, bikes, etc is not generating pounds and pounds of extra muscle. Lance Armstrong is just about spot on for BMI.
Hm. Is it just me, or was the horse that equestrienne was riding the kind that was bred to haul around a knight in full plate armour and all the trimmings? As to toting 80lb haybales, well done with that, but on the other hand there are slender graceful African ladies who can walk for miles balancing five gallons of water in stone jars on their heads, so it’s all kinda relative, methinks.
But if you’re a hundred pounds and they make eighty pounds of hay, and you can’t move that, it doesn’t mean your body is screwed up–it just means that you can’t carry that. If bales of hay came in four hundred pound packs and someone couldn’t move that, it wouldn’t mean their body wasn’t keeping up with their needs–just that the hay is too heavy.
Yes, but then what? Horses need to be fed, hay needs to be tossed around. Maybe my point was poorly articulated. I was trying to say that she’s keeping up with the necessary manual labor, and overly thin and weak women might look down on her for being fat, but her body does what she needs, where those other women could not keep up. Being stylishly thin is nice, but what’s the point if your body isn’t doing what you want with it? Better to eat more and put on some muscle and even risk being at a higher BMI so you can accomplish things.
And her horse did appear to be a draft or draft cross. However, she also appeared to be doing dressage, where draft’s are a little more common (compared to other sports).
I think this makes sense. After all, if you run or do any sort of exercise, it makes you hungry, right? So you have to struggle (sometimes a LOT) not to eat. Eventually, doing that gets old.
My understanding of exercise is that it helps in cardiovascular fitness, alertness, cancer prevention, osteoperosis prevention and generally is protective, but is not necessarily the best way to lose weight. However, being lighter makes exercise easier because there’s less of you to move around.
I trained for my last marathon specifically to lose weight. I was at my then-heaviest of 185. I’m a 5’8" woman with a 31-inch waist and large boobs and hips. Anyway, I did all the marathon training without adjusting my eating and lost a grand total of 4 pounds over 4 months of training. It was incredibly disheartening. But, after I had my son, I managed to lose 25 pounds over a 6-month time frame just by eating better and doing more moderate exercise. Go figure.
I think you got exactly backwards.
The number only tells you the relationship between the height and weight of a person, regardless of body composition (muscle, water, fat, bones, etc.). You can find a fat, can’t-lift-the-ass-off-a-chair person with the exact same BMI of bodybuilder-Arnold. Which is why a lot of us think it’s a very lose indicator of health.
Body fat percentage is a much better measure, but harder to determine using your average household instruments.