I never said I was overweight and I never contradicted you. I was elaborating. You agree with me that bmi is bullshit for determining health because you have to be unhealthy for it even to apply to you. You claim to disagree, but everything you’ve said supports that you agree with me. BMI determines “adverse health consequences” for an overwhelmingly sedentary population. It doesn’t determine whether you need to get off your ass and work out because if you’re in the “normal range” you definitely need to, and if you’re “overweight,” chances are you don’t.
You want to know how to tell if you’re obese? Look in a mirror. If you can see fat, you’re fat. The chart is pointless and this discussion is pointless.
I’m not agreeing with what you’re saying because you took everything I said, took off on a tangent and pretended it was relevant when it wasn’t.
BMI is not a measure of fitness. It is a value you relate to statistics because it is relevant for the vast majority of people. If your BMI is out of recommended normal values, high or low, you’re setting yourself up for problems, many of which take years to develop. If you have a BMI of 30 and its not because you’re a muscle man, you will most probably be in shit at some point in the future.
When you try to understand how something works and to be able to effectively communicate that information, you need objective values, numbers. You can’t use something subjective like “oh I ‘look’ fat” because you can’t convey accurately what that means to people that have a different perception of what fat is.
You are agreeing with me on absolutely every single point.
The only difference is that I’m trying to point out that BMI is unrelated to fitness and falling under the “normal range” doesn’t mean you don’t need to work out, whereas you’re trying to shoot down ghost arguments you think I’m having with you.
I agree that if you’re a weak, lazy, unbuilt individual, BMI is going to predict any adverse health problems you’re going to have in the future.
What I’m trying to say that you’re not quite willing to grasp is that being weak, lazy, and unbuilt IS an adverse health problem that everyone BMI applies to is facing RIGHT NOW, in the present.
Which is why BMI is bullshit for predicting how active you should be. The only people it applies to who don’t fall under the normal range are:
250lb. blimps who don’t need a chart to tell them they should melt some of that shit off
Athletes
A very small number of individuals who are a little bit tubby but don’t really need to do anything about it if they don’t want to.
People who need to eat MORE
And so, BMI is useless across almost the entire board for determining if you need any lifestyle changes. And what else could you use it for? Nothing.
You can’t use something subjective like “oh I ‘look’ fat” because you can’t convey accurately what that means to people that have a different perception of what fat is.
If you’re not fat enough to be able to tell beyond the shadow of a doubt you’re a fatty, you’re not fat enough to really be in serious trouble. If you want to be a perfectionist about it, the BMI system works, but there’s no reason to dwell on vague, insignificant amounts of fat. Mirrors are still your best bet.
The problem is what constitutes a “normal” amount of mirror fat. Especially among certain women, anything that seems to show curves instead of bone indicates that you’re “fat”.
I bike 3-7 miles a day depending on how much energy I have and were I have to go. Everything near my house is too far away to walk, but too close to drive. Every couple of weeks me and my friends get together and play some 3v3 or 4v4 football. Sometimes I just go for a swim in my lake or bike to some random place and try and figure out how to get home. And sometimes while I’m waiting for my newest ROM to download or during ads I’ll do about 50 crunches. I do around 300 a day if I’m bored. Or sometimes none at all and I’ll just try to finish my game of Brain Lord.
But therein lies the problem that if someone is morbidly obese, exercise would become a necessary function of life, otherwise life would cease to exist at all. Also being fit is the idea of being neither obese nor anorexic.
exercise is not actually necessary to lose weight. In fact, its not even very efficient. Running 3 miles burns about 300 calories. That’s the same amount of calories in a muffin. It takes about 2 months to build up to the point where you can run 3 miles. See my point?
If you want to lose weight, its better to cut back on the intake of calories. Sometimes it can be easier to combine exercise with diet, so that you don’t have to diet as much. But still, the amount of calories burned through exercise is pretty minimal compared to the number you could cut out through changing your diet.
Exercise for the other benefits, like a better heart rate and generally feeling better about yourself.
If you really want to lose weight, you should just use crystal meth. I actually started gaining weight when I started exercising, so I’m guessing you shouldn’t do it if you want to lose weight. D:
Energy is conserved, but the difference between a McDonalds Big Mac and a Subway Club is that less energy is stored from the sub and the energy conserved isn’t all fat.
The only way to lose fat is by losing weight. That’s another myth of the fitness industry: that you can change your body composition with exercise alone. The ways in which you lose body fat, and where its stored on your body, are rock-hard genetic, and fat is only lost or put on with weight changes. If you want to look slimmer, you have to lose weight. Only certain types of medication and disease can change your fat distribution without weight changes(and aging can do it, of course).
You probably gained weight when you exercised because its very easy to offset calories burned from exercising by eating. Many people struggle to lose weight with excercising because they think it gives them the excuse to eat more. For instance, like the example I gave, you can erase the energy expenditure of running three miles by adding a single muffin to your diet. If you want to lose weight with exercise, you can’t add calories to your diet.
Except it’s practically the same if you put cheese and mayonnaise/ranch dressing in your club, which I suppose is a reasonable expectation from most people. And if they do put in light dressing, it gives them the impression they can eat more of something else because they cut down on the calories and fat in their sub, which in the end, is not better than McD’s. Sin mentioned that “good/bad food” marketing ploy in his first post. Also, my favorite thing about Subway is their cookies that you can see through their bag because they’re so greasy (I actually like them, but they’re not fresh and soft most of the time ).
Edit 10 days later: For the record, I was talking about a 6" long sub, not even 12". >.>
