I run what I estimate should be about 2 miles at least thrice a week, or every day when I don’t have classes or work and excess free time makes me feel guilty.
Then I do 50 pushups and 50 sit-ups every day for no real reason other than because they’re easy and quick.
I reenact. 
It’s really fun, I do medieval-ish stuff (just the general time, it’s too much effort to specify beyond that since I haven’t fully decided which era I’m going to do…mmm, probably early Viking though). And since we train for 3 hours a week and 9 foot spears are fucking heavy, it’s a pretty good workout. Apart from that I go to the gym sometimes, and do just a general little workout for myself at home. i’m in pretty good shape, it’s fun.
True, swimming is a lower impact activity than running. Still, I have it to thank for my bad knee - swimming breaststroke competitively and doing that frog-kick for years will put just a little stress on it. 
I’m working on it!
Weight is all about the first law of thermodynamics: energy is conserved. It doesn’t come from nowhere. I know guys that are like “oh my god, that was such a good meal, it was so BIG, oh god, so fatty mmmmm” and then 2 hours later they talk about how they need to go to the gym.
Anything you might hear about “good food” vs “bad food” is all marketing bullshit and I can point to a nice little body of research and anecdotes from patient interviews to support that. Its not what you eat, its how much you eat.
For the record, I don’t work out. My physical activity includes walking to and from work. My BMI is 21 with little fat and my diet consists mostly of pizza, burgers and pasta.
If your knee is busted, do more swimming. Swimming won’t damage your knees like running.
Yeah. Losing weight is a really simple but hard process: take in less energy than you put out. An entire industry is built up on gimicks for people who can’t or have trouble doing that. Every time I check my email I see some new headline like ‘new study shows that people who drink green tea every day lose weight’ or something like that.
A lot of it is just genetics, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are. Same with the way your body looks. Not to say there’s no point in going to the gym or working out. But the idea that you can get ‘cut’ or change your body shape is mostly b.s. People who have nice bodies were born with them; they didn’t get them at the gym.
That being said, its amazing the shit that exercise can improve, from your longevity to attitude to memory.
For the record, I don’t work out. My physical activity includes walking to and from work. My BMI is 21 with little fat and my diet consists mostly of pizza, burgers and pasta.
BMI isn’t accurate for a lot of people. Mine’s usually hovered around 26-27, but my pulse is usually around 70, blood pressure 80/120, and I don’t look fat. Plus, there’s Peyton Manning, who has a BMI of 29.6, which is technically borderline obese 
Pretty much the same as Weiila, minus the swimming.
License but no car. Walks a lot (because my bike is dead at the moment. Need to change just about everything on it. Old bikes ftl. 
)
Keep telling myself that I have to start doing something, someday. But so far, meh.
Hey Vicki. Judging by the popularity of this thread, you’ve hit the jackpot. All these hardcore jocks infesting our community, and pretending to be regular, run-of-the-mill nerds! 
Unfortunately I don’t have much time lately to take care of my bod. I go to the gym once a week for weight training (about 2 to 2.5 hours of heavy lifting), and I have some equipment at home (mostly dumbbells), where I manage to pump iron a few hours during a week.
A few years ago I discovered a new hobby that helps me stay in shape – extremely entertaining and … tasty activity. Tasty? I am growing some veggies and raspberries in my backyard. Molto delicioso!
Get a spam filter already!
Man, BMI is total bullshit. My BMI is like 23, and I have a gut and moobs. My sister is apparently full-on obese (isn’t) and my mom has a BMI of 21 when she’s a borderline anorexic.
Until today I had never heard of the word “moobs”. I have managed to learn something, wow!
The proper term is gynecomastia.
BMI is a very good predictor of adverse life events. The only people to whom it doesn’t really apply are people who excessively work out. Muscle men don’t fit in the category of normal people. If your BMI is 30 and its not muscle, you’ve got issues. Whether or not you think you’re obese is irrelevant because being obese or overweight is a definition based on BMI numbers, no matter what it looks like or is comfortable to think.
That may be true, but I’m still not worried because my vitals are better than average. BMI, afterall, is only an indicator of health - if your blood pressure is high and your BMI is high, you could probably stand to lose a few pounds. But if your health is good, you have no signs of developing diabetes, its inaccurate
Its also inaccurate for different races, because of differences in body fat and muscle tendencies. I believe Asians tend to have less body fat and blacks more muscle mass.
I would argue that those stereotypes are misleading and shouldn’t be used as the basis to believe anything.
If you blood pressure was that high at your age I would be really worried. Whatever you want to believe, it all boils down to a bunch of statistics. Statistics are probabilities and in the States, your probability of acquiring a problem based on established and accepted probabilities is what will dictate your coverage, if any.
Yeah, I meant 120/80 The doctor said it was more or less within acceptable range; I see somewhere else 120 is ‘prehypertension’, so who knows.
Yeah, I guess I have to admit that statistically BMI is more accurate than not. I’ll choose to believe that I"m the exception
Though, the racial thing is not based on stereotypes, but is backed up. Here’s one example. I’ll look for others.
OBJECTIVE: To study the relationship between body fat percentage and body mass index (BMI) in three different ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malays and Indians) in order to evaluate the validity of the BMI cut-off points for obesity. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SUBJECTS: Two-hundred and ninety-one subjects, purposively selected to ensure adequate representation of range of age and BMI of the general adult population, with almost equal numbers from each ethnic and gender group. MEASUREMENTS: Body weight, body height, sitting height, wrist and femoral widths, skinfold thicknesses, total body water by deuterium oxide dilution, densitometry with Bodpod® and bone mineral content with Hologic® QDR-4500. Body fat percentage was calculated using a four-compartment model. RESULTS: Compared with body fat percentage (BF%) obtained using the reference method, BF% for the Singaporean Chinese, Malays and Indians were under-predicted by BMI, sex and age when an equation developed in a Caucasian population was used. The mean prediction error ranged from 2.7% to 5.6% body fat. The BMI/BF% relationship was also different among the three Singaporean groups, with Indians having the highest BF% and Chinese the lowest for the same BMI. These differences could be ascribed to differences in body build. It was also found that for the same amount of body fat as Caucasians who have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 (cut-off for obesity as defined by WHO), the BMI cut-off points for obesity would have to be about 27 kg/m2 for Chinese and Malays and 26 kg/m2 for Indians. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that the relationship between BF% and BMI is different between Singaporeans and Caucasians and also among the three ethnic groups in Singapore. If obesity is regarded as an excess of body fat and not as an excess of weight (increased BMI), the cut-off points for obesity in Singapore based on the BMI would need to be lowered. This would have immense public health implications in terms of policy related to obesity prevention and management.
My answer to your quote is simple: sampling. When you run statistics, you have a sample population and you make assumptions as to what it means. Whenever you want to apply statistics, you need to ask yourself if the population you’re comparing your stats to is similar. The issue of the representation with sampling is very complicated because you have to ask a lot of questions about the various confounds and their relationship to your group of interest.
That said, the socio-cultural-economic situation of the average chinese person is not comparable to that of the average white western male.
I’m in shape… Round is a shape.
No actually I’m in good shape. I lift weights at least 3 times a week, plus I do throwing in track and field year round. I practice for it 4-5 times a week, while trying to eat fairly healthy (very little junk food/pop lots of water)
BMI is only useful if you’re trying to compare yourself to people with shitty body composition.
I’m 5’8/160 and it puts me at about 24. Apparently, fit is the new obese.
Oh God
Well some people might know that I played football for four years so I’ve been in the routine of lifting four days a week for quite a while now. I actually just recently started riding my bike around town (cause I got my license impounded) and it’s a lot of fun to find new bike trails, and even better now that I have my mom’s ipod.
One of my favorite things about working out has always been the high I get right when I’m done. And doing drugs after a workout is awesome.
For some reason I decided to start doing push ups and sit ups between every arena and battleground match I play in WoW, and I have a set of dumbbells in my computer room to do random lifts as well…
Actually my favorite thing about working out and lifting is that I can eat whatever I want however much I want whenever I want.
And yeah I’m probably morbidly obese on the BMI dealio
To be in the cool club you have to be able to squat more than twice your body weight~
I swear no one ever reads what I write.
Anyway, 18.5 or less is underweight, 18.5 to 25 is normal, 25 to 30 is overweight , 30-35 is obese and above 35 is all kinds of definitions about being morbidly obese. A nice graph is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Body_mass_index_chart.svg You all know how tall you are and how much you weigh, so stop making silly statements of “ohoho I am obese, this is stupid”.
So Hades falls in the normal range and Lanyx is probably fine depending on how fat he is. It doesn’t really matter how much exercise you do if you have a lot of fat deposition. If you do, then the index applies. If you don’t , then it doesn’t.
A lot of things depend on body weight. For example, body composition is crucial for fertility. If your bmi is too low, a girl won’t have a period because there won’t be enough estrogen to go around to get the cycle going. That’s why little girls don’t grow tits and have hips like a guy’s. Some olympic gymnasts get their first periods of their lives AFTER their careers even. If the bmi is too high, all the fat will be converting estrogen and then the girl will be a walking birth control pill and won’t have a period either. There are a lot of little details like that :P.
I fall on the edge of overweight when really I’m extremely underweight compared to a fit person my height. According to that chart, most pro athletes are borderline obese.
So while I fall in the “normal range” (barely), that chart is still bullshit for determining fitness. All it can do is tell you how acceptably mediocre you are. If I was 185 and fairly ripped, I’d be over 28. That’s absurd.
What I’m trying to say is that anyone in the normal range by bmi standards is unfit because the bmi system assumes you’re scrawny.
Edit2: Unless you’re a chick.
Gee Hades, how many fucking times did I say athletes didn’t apply and explained How many fucking times? Please, go fucking count :P.
And you’re not overweight, you’re normal.
The chart doesn’t determine fitness. The chart associates body weight / height (squared) as a predictor of adverse health consequences (proven facts).
