Quote Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet View Post
Personally, I recall hearing that the human skeleton weighs only few kilos from my biology teacher. He talked specifically of how "big bones" don't actually weigh enough to explain overweight.
Maybe your teacher was saying that a big boned person would only realistically get about 3 additional kilos worth of bones, therefore it wasn't enough to justify a bigger weight difference than that?

I know BMI is flawed even used as a guideline, since it only uses height and weight. I guess using it in my post wasn't such a good idea, I assumed because it's a more commonly known index it would be easier to talk about it.

My point was that society idealise thinness to a point that I feel is unhealthy. I don't mean that every skinny person is unhealthy (they might be, they might not, better to check with a doctor since they have a higher chance to be than if they were of average weight). The fact that the "healthy" BMI range was lowered was just one example.

Really, I have a beef about it because of a friend I had who had an eating disorder. She was anorexic, and it was quite obvious. Well, she tried getting better, but as she started to gain a bit of weight to become healthier, she started getting comments about how she "was getting fat". When she was still underweight, and more than that, obviously underweight.
I'm sure you can imagine what kind of effect that had on someone who was already suffering for a skewed perception of her body and an eating disorder.
Basically, society was telling her "you look better when you're unhealthy. Don't try to get your health under control".

It's the main thing that makes me very passionate about the subject, but it's not the only one. I've known other similar things happening. People are used to considering the health problems that are more likely to occur with being overweight, but not those that are more likely to occur with being underweight. Because society has been showing thin people to us and saying "that's the norm", some people who are healthy make themselves unhealthy and get the approval of those around them. I hate that.

So my rant was really about that, and how it makes it hard for people who are underweight to get help getting healthier. A lot of people will brush off their problems, say they're lucky and it's a nice problem to have, or try and convince them to stay that way because they "look good".

I really wasn't commenting on the health of any particular person.

Oh, and @Frozen_feet, I think your teacher might have been a bit off-base with his argument. The bones themselves might not weigh much, but there needs to be flesh between them. Obviously, someone with a narrow waist, narrow hips, narrow shoulders, narrow chest cavity, etc, will need less pounds/kilos of flesh to "fill the frame" than someone who has a broad set of all of the above. So the weight difference isn't only about what the bones themselves weigh.

That's why the WHR is a better guide, because it takes into account the width of your hips (bones, so the width won't get below a certain point), and compares them to your waist (where the only bones are the spine, so the measure is a measure or your flesh).

It makes it more accurate both for underweight people (their hips don't get thinner past some point but their waist does, making their ratio "wrong") and for overweight people (they pack a lot of fat around the waist, which shouldn't be that wide since it doesn't have many bones at all, making their ratio "wrong")

Then again, the WHR isn't perfect either. If I remember correctly, one thing my friend struggled with when trying to get back to a healthy weight is that her WHR became "normal" (or even "overweight". I think it was "overweight" but I'm not sure) long before her health problems stopped.