– Why do doctors care so much about your BMI when it’s has been proven to be such a flawed metric for ones actual health?
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How has it “been proven to be a false metric”?
The only people who say that are obese people trying to use body builders to justify their obesity
We cannot measure health and fitness directly, because unlike height or number of arms, health and fitness are not exact perfectly defined quantities.
Instead health and fitness is a bit fuzzy. It has to be measured indirectly and any indirect measurement is going to be imperfect, but imperfect is not the same as useless.
IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but if one person scores 70 and another person scores 130, that doesn’t tell you NOTHING. You just have to take the information with a pinch of salt.
Doctors are people too. They stick to training and the best practices handed to them. They have many many patients and are not interested in getting all Grey’s Anatomy and inventing a new way to measure weight or lobby to get the latest tech. Mostly they are concerned with time spent on each patient and living their life.
It is a metric a doctor can reference, because just telling a patient they are fat doesn’t seem to go too well. It sounds judge. For most people BMI is a pretty good guideline, but it does breakdown for a minority of people in certain types of body categories. Many people who dislike BMI simply like the anti fat shaming rhetoric which tells people it’s ok to be obese as long as they are confident.
BMI is a pretty good metric for most people, it’s just thrown off by people with abnormal amounts of muscle. If you are not a person with a huge amount of muscle, it’s probably a fairly good indicator of your overall health.
I also think you are probably overestimating how much doctors care about your BMI, when they have so many other more precise metrics to corroborate it.
Doctors don’t about BMI.
They care if you’re over a healthy weight.
BMI is a good simple way to screen for people being overweight.
“Are you this many lbs at this height? That’s probably overweight”
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**SOME** people will be off the BMI scale (rare) but that’s why IF your BMI number is high that lets the doctor know they need to investigate further.
Also, even IF you are not “fat” you are just strong and muscular, so your BMI is high but you are lean, that can still cause health problems. Your heart and lungs don’t get bigger. They have to work harder to run an oversized body. So if you have a high BMI but you are lean and healthy otherwise, that doesn’t mean its “bad” weight, but it does mean there are some things your doctor still needs to pay attention to.
(example, bodybuilders have a high likelihood of sleep apnea, that’s not because of fat. That’s just probably associated with having a big neck)
NOTE: People like to use the “but muscle though” argument against BMI. YES being muscular skews BMI. There is usually no confusion about who those people are. As a guy that’s had a 29-30 BMI lean, when you are high in the chart but its “actually muscle” you LOOK it. You don’t have to explain to your doctor that “oh well this is muscle though”. You should look like an obviously muscular person.
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