"Who's NOT Overweight?"
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I notice this a lot. At work, I would figure that I was one of three workers that weren't overweight/obese. That's only out of about 20 people but that is still quite a bit. I also notice it when I go out. The mall, restaurants, the park. Being overweight is just the norm now because the average American is overweight and I think when people hear average they think average = normal.0
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It was just an interesting observation for me--even our folks with "active" jobs are probably overweight. Only two our of 14 were a healthy weight.
I know not everyone works in a office, but with their office mates or stay-at-home-parent folks, is my office an anomaly? Or is it normal?
First, I've been overweight for a grand total of maybe 4 years in my life, and I'm 50. 6 months early on ... and then I lost it. About a year 20 years later ... and then I lost it. And then about 2 or 2.5 years more recently ... and then I lost it. I've been maintaining for the past 2 years.
Second, regarding my office, very few of us would be overweight. Most of us are reasonably fit and active.
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Where I work obesity is about the same as the national average. I find it interesting when I go for a bicycle ride along the Trinity Trail because the statistics are flipped. People who are lean are the rule but there are a few people who are overweight.2
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I think it really depends on location. I'm a stay-at-home mom and it seems here that most of the other stay at home moms are not over weight or obese. So many of my mom friends spend hours at the gym and are always training for their next marathon. I have several overweight friends, though they are not the norm.
I also work part time at a dance studio so am surrounded by people who highly value being healthy and active.
According to my BMI, I am overweight. But my hip to weight ratio puts me in a healthy range. I don't tend to carry my weight in my stomach and tend to have a small waist.2 -
OliveGirl128 wrote: »CattOfTheGarage wrote: »My life insurance company charges extra if your BMI is 'obese' or higher. No penalty for 'overweight'. I think it's fair, to be honest, for life insurance - which is basically gambling. You pays your money, you takes your chance.
Health insurance is rather different. Putting hurdles between people and healthcare because they're unhealthy is absurd.
But from an insurance perspective, those who are obese are more likely to incur more health care costs, just like smokers.
And the idea that that fact should be used to price them out of access to healthcare is just perverse and horrible to me. It's not a luxury like life insurance, it's a basic need.
But that's a whole other conversation. I have to say, I couldn't tell you how many people are overweight in my workplace - I don't really know how to tell. Sure, there are some people that are obviously obese, but how can you tell if someone's BMI is normal or overweight just by looking at them? That seems like a bit of a superpower to me.6 -
CattOfTheGarage wrote: »OliveGirl128 wrote: »CattOfTheGarage wrote: »My life insurance company charges extra if your BMI is 'obese' or higher. No penalty for 'overweight'. I think it's fair, to be honest, for life insurance - which is basically gambling. You pays your money, you takes your chance.
Health insurance is rather different. Putting hurdles between people and healthcare because they're unhealthy is absurd.
But from an insurance perspective, those who are obese are more likely to incur more health care costs, just like smokers.
And the idea that that fact should be used to price them out of access to healthcare is just perverse and horrible to me. It's not a luxury like life insurance, it's a basic need.
But that's a whole other conversation. I have to say, I couldn't tell you how many people are overweight in my workplace - I don't really know how to tell. Sure, there are some people that are obviously obese, but how can you tell if someone's BMI is normal or overweight just by looking at them? That seems like a bit of a superpower to me.
No, it isn't a basic need. In order for insurance to work some people are going to end up paying for insurance even when they have no health problems. People who smoke, who are obese, or who don't exercise tend to pay less than the cost of their health care. This is unfair to the people who are making the right choices and yet still have high insurance premiums because of the people who aren't taking care of themselves.11 -
TimothyFish wrote: »CattOfTheGarage wrote: »OliveGirl128 wrote: »CattOfTheGarage wrote: »My life insurance company charges extra if your BMI is 'obese' or higher. No penalty for 'overweight'. I think it's fair, to be honest, for life insurance - which is basically gambling. You pays your money, you takes your chance.
Health insurance is rather different. Putting hurdles between people and healthcare because they're unhealthy is absurd.
But from an insurance perspective, those who are obese are more likely to incur more health care costs, just like smokers.
And the idea that that fact should be used to price them out of access to healthcare is just perverse and horrible to me. It's not a luxury like life insurance, it's a basic need.
But that's a whole other conversation. I have to say, I couldn't tell you how many people are overweight in my workplace - I don't really know how to tell. Sure, there are some people that are obviously obese, but how can you tell if someone's BMI is normal or overweight just by looking at them? That seems like a bit of a superpower to me.
No, it isn't a basic need. In order for insurance to work some people are going to end up paying for insurance even when they have no health problems. People who smoke, who are obese, or who don't exercise tend to pay less than the cost of their health care. This is unfair to the people who are making the right choices and yet still have high insurance premiums because of the people who aren't taking care of themselves.
What about people who break their legs? Are you going to check if they were careful enough before setting it, or refuse to treat them if they were doing a stupid skateboard trick or climbing a dodgy ladder?
What about people with skin cancer? Better check if they ever skipped the sunscreen!
"Sorry, we're not going to treat you for HIV because we've interviewed all your partners and you didn't use a condom that one time".
"Oh, I'm sorry, are you choking? Well, just wait there while we figure out whether you were chewing your food properly... No, sorry, your mother says you always wolf it, so we can't help you this time. Have a nice day!'
If healthcare isn't a basic need, I don't know what in blazes is. And the idea you can sanguinely let people suffer and die because you've made a blithe judgement on whether they deserve their misfortune is chilling. You must be awfully confident of your own deserving.35 -
I work in a very multicultural office for a Japanese firm, and I'm trying but it's super hard to generalize!
Most of the fairly young people (up to 40 or so) are normal weight, although there are a fair number of men whose bellies are putting significant strain on their shirt buttons.
Many of the older men could stand to lose quite a few pounds, particularly the Brits.
The majority of the continential European women are verging on twig-like.
The biggest spilt in the women is that the back office roles seem to have a noticeably higher proportion of overweight women than the front office, client-facing roles.
The Japanese women are generally very petite and slim, but a lot of the expat men find that the long hours and eating at their desks give rise to, let's say, a softening of the middle by the time they hit mid-30s.
My team are all regular gym-goers and in good shape. We regularly get excited about finding high protein yogurts in the local supermarket, see a small bar of dark sea-salt chocolate as a very occasional afternoon treat, and compare our 1 rep max progress after weights sessions!
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OliveGirl128 wrote: »That makes sense. Isn't around two thirds of the States overweight and obese? Six out of seven being overweight is higher but it could be demographics.
The SAHMs I know tend to be normal to overweight. There are a few obese. My guess is that it is a slimmer group than average for our age. I am one of the larger ones at 158lbs and 5'8". Normal BMI.
I'm a sahm as well and I literally do not know another sahm that's not overweight/very overweight. I'm definitely the odd one out in that sense, in my little circle.
It's almost backwards where I live. Most of the SAHMs I know are pretty darn skinny.
I'm on maternity leave right now, but definitely not part of that trend1 -
So, at a meeting this week, we were all chatting about random stuff and one person brought up her partner was coming onto her insurance because her partner's company's insurance was going to start charging more for smokers (private company). Another one said the same thing, but it was due to health stats like BMI, BP, etc. and they were given notice this would take effect January 1, 2018. Change now or pay more later, I guess.
The smoking thing didn't phase anyone, but the weight thing did. One of my office mates said, "That's not a fair thing to charge for, I mean, who's NOT overweight?" Myself and one other person raised our hands. Two out of 14 people. I don't perceive anyone being obese, but I really have no idea and don't really think about it. I was obese, lost 100+ pounds and have been in maintenance almost three years.
It was just an interesting observation for me--even our folks with "active" jobs are probably overweight. Only two our of 14 were a healthy weight.
I know not everyone works in a office, but with their office mates or stay-at-home-parent folks, is my office an anomaly? Or is it normal?
I have a VERY active job in a warehouse where I take up to 40,000+ steps a day. However, over half of the warehouse workers are considered 'overweight' with a few probably in the 'obese' range as well.
That's where I see it all comes down to diet. They'll drink 3 bottles of pop, have fast food for lunch, and visit the vending machine off and on during the day.6 -
Yeah, I wouldn't either even though I have both a healthy BMI and BF%.HeliumIsNoble wrote: »
Agreed.Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Were the other 12 people overweight? I realize this may be hard to tell by looking if they are just a little overweight but most of the people that I know who are at a healthy weight think (or at least say) they are overweight.
In the situation as described in the OP, I would not have stuck my arm up in response to that.
I've never really thought about it but I'd guess that my office is about 1/2 overweight or obese and 1/2 not just by looks. Much more overweight than obese though.0 -
goldthistime wrote: »goldthistime wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »So a man my height that weighs 175 lbs but eats total garbage, drinks nearly daily, has vitals worse than mine, would be considered in a healthy range and get a better premium. I just did my BMI and I'm at 27.5. That's 2.5 points away from obese.
Is your waist measurement less than 1/2 of your height? That is an alternative measurement that would take into consideration someone who has some level of muscle mass/less abdominal fat (which is an increased risk factor). IMO this should also be taken into consideration when determining any weight based insurance discount/penalty
https://qz.com/1002707/bmi-calculators-arent-accurate-but-our-body-fat-calculator-is/
At 6'2" and 205 my BMI is 26.3. However my waist-height ratio is 35 in waist / 74 in height = .473 so below .50.
The doctors that give the work physicals are real sticklers on BMI, but I've been lifting weights for years and they never had a problem with my weight.
I've been hearing this waist to height ratio, termed "overfat" if the ratio is higher than 0.50, all over the news lately. Here's one of many examples:
http://fox17online.com/2017/07/31/is-overfat-the-new-obesity/
"A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health suggests the number of people who meet the criteria for overfat in the top 30 industrialized countries are more than all of the obese and overweight people in the world. In fact, they estimate that 90% of the men and 50% of the children in the US, New Zealand, Greece and Iceland are overfat. In the top overfat countries, researchers found 80% of the women were overfat, too."
If insurance were start using waist to height exclusively instead of BMI, very few would pass the test.
I wouldn't mind it at all.. I'm 5'10" with a 38" waist and currently 50lbs overweight according to BMI. At a 34.5" waist i would be below the overfat ratio. Being shapped like a pear makes me less at risk of anything weight related and my waist is usually around 34 inches when im still somewhat overweight based on BMI, yet it's when i look and feel great and healthiest. I agree that BMI is wonky when you get into the tall and short population and prefer the overfat ratio.
Genetically I'm an apple. It wouldn't take much of a weight gain and I would pass BMI and fail the overfat ratio. As much as I'd like to object to the idea, it's true, I know I'm at a bigger risk of various health problems than a pear.
Otoh, I might fail the test unfairly if I were having digestive problems (as I often do) that cause gas and/or inflammation.
Very true...people get bloated from IBS and a bunch of things that could mess up weight related risks1 -
We pay a surcharge for smoking and another surcharge for health insurance if we don't do annual health screenings (these are provided for free). The health screenings have a point system, with 4 potential points of 13 possible going to better of BMI or BF% (they only use bio-electric impedance for measurement, so it is much lower than true BF% anyway). Other factors are various cholesterol, fasting glucose, and I can't recall what else. If we get 10 points, we avoid the surcharge.
If we don't get the 10 points, we can still avoid the surcharge by doing training. It used to be watching videos online and completing a quiz at the end, but now the "training" is counseling by phone. Also, the counseling may need to be quarterly at the initial counselor's discretion. That is new this year and I don't think a lot of employees have noticed it (I read the fine print). The screenings are next week, so will be interested how quickly that word and grumpiness gets around.
To be fair, the training is worthless. I had to do a training one year because my LDL was outside of their reference range - it was 17, so they considered it to be too low. The training video was all about the risk of high cholesterol. I'm thinking I should be able to get enough points again this year to avoid counseling, but if not, I bet the counselors know less than me... and I bet they don't individualize it. Oh well - it may just be something I have to do in order to pay less.
ETA: On the prevalence of overweight and obese people... in America, it seems a majority are overweight and obese. I've noticed anecdotally that it is so common that overweight is subjectively considered now to be "normal." Someone who is overweight is often just viewed as being a healthy weight. This occurred to me as I was losing weight. I'm not really overweight anymore, but the comments I got as I went through that phase - by people I knew before weight loss and people I had just met alike - if I mentioned I was trying to lose weight, I would get comments that I didn't need to. There is even 1 co-worker who acted like she was considering to try an intervention because she thought I had body image disorder. Kept trying to tell me I needed to add more weight. Perception has just changed to our new reality of most Americans being overweight or obese.2 -
We have a few obese people (just visually assessing; I'm not going to actually poll anyone), a ton of overweight folks, and a select few in-shape-looking people, who are younger (millennial-types).
Now that I think about it, there are also a few people my age (late 30s-early 40s) that, like me, were obese for a while, and then lost a ton of weight and now exercise regularly. I wonder if that's typical...0 -
Packerjohn wrote: »BMI is horseshit. Sorry to hear people have that *kitten* of insurance that they charge you a premium for measurement that doesn't take account for ANYTHING other than mass.
It's right for around 85% of the population. @piperdown44 insurance had a good solution in that they would look at waist measurement to take into consideration anyone who was muscular.
No, it's not. It's a very arbitrary figure that ignores the fact that those right across the "overweight" threshold actually have LOWER all-causes mortality rates than those in the "healthy" range.
People like to treat BMI as some ethereal, objective standard when it is, in fact, completely contrived. It wasn't even accepted by the majority of the medical community in the U.S. when the government decided to realign standards with WHO.8 -
OliveGirl128 wrote: »OliveGirl128 wrote: »CattOfTheGarage wrote: »My life insurance company charges extra if your BMI is 'obese' or higher. No penalty for 'overweight'. I think it's fair, to be honest, for life insurance - which is basically gambling. You pays your money, you takes your chance.
Health insurance is rather different. Putting hurdles between people and healthcare because they're unhealthy is absurd.
But from an insurance perspective, those who are obese are more likely incur more health care costs, just like smokers.
I'm 6 ft and 200 lbs. my body fat is roughly 10%. My vitals are near perfect. I'm "overweight" and approaching "obese" based on that. Total horseshit.
Do you really think your stats are the norm though?
Let's make the ridiculousness of BMI clear, since you've set up this softball:
If his stats were the norm, what would be your opinion of the current BMI scale?4 -
European perspective: Health insurance should be available to all under the same conditions. It's a basic need. I do think though that differences in other insurances are fine, like mortage, private pension and other things.
Having said that, being in a large city in Scotland I see very few obese people. Yes, they are there, but nowhere near as much as other countries/places I've lived at. At work I mainly work with younger people. Most of them are normal. Two out of 20 could be considered pretty chubby. The older people around are generally fairly normal to slightly overweight. Not much big obesity around. I do work at a university though, at a faculty generally associated with the outdoors.4 -
European perspective: Health insurance should be available to all under the same conditions. It's a basic need.
As an American, I wish we had single payer, but that is a different debate entirely.
As a type 1 diabetic who did not make any life choices nor fail to make any life choices that could have contributed or prevented my expensive, treatable (but not curable) disease; I can't afford paying for treatment out of pocket. Without health insurance coverage, I would die. It might take 2-5 days after I ran out of insulin, but I would literally die. For me, health insurance is definitely a basic need - as much so as water is a basic need.
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accidentalpancake wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »BMI is horseshit. Sorry to hear people have that *kitten* of insurance that they charge you a premium for measurement that doesn't take account for ANYTHING other than mass.
It's right for around 85% of the population. @piperdown44 insurance had a good solution in that they would look at waist measurement to take into consideration anyone who was muscular.
No, it's not. It's a very arbitrary figure that ignores the fact that those right across the "overweight" threshold actually have LOWER all-causes mortality rates than those in the "healthy" range.
People like to treat BMI as some ethereal, objective standard when it is, in fact, completely contrived. It wasn't even accepted by the majority of the medical community in the U.S. when the government decided to realign standards with WHO.
It's not the first time I hear that...I'd like to know more about it, like why do they have less mortality rates and I'm wondering what BF% that is.0 -
Packerjohn wrote: »So a man my height that weighs 175 lbs but eats total garbage, drinks nearly daily, has vitals worse than mine, would be considered in a healthy range and get a better premium. I just did my BMI and I'm at 27.5. That's 2.5 points away from obese.
Is your waist measurement less than 1/2 of your height? That is an alternative measurement that would take into consideration someone who has some level of muscle mass/less abdominal fat (which is an increased risk factor). IMO this should also be taken into consideration when determining any weight based insurance discount/penalty
https://qz.com/1002707/bmi-calculators-arent-accurate-but-our-body-fat-calculator-is/
At 6'2" and 205 my BMI is 26.3. However my waist-height ratio is 35 in waist / 74 in height = .473 so below .50.
The doctors that give the work physicals are real sticklers on BMI, but I've been lifting weights for years and they never had a problem with my weight.
You're like my doppelganger. At 6'1" (really 6'1.5") and 198 pounds I'm technically overweight per BMI calculations but there is nobody that would every point to me as overweight (I have a bit of a string bean build).
That said, I am targeting to get down to the 180ish range just so I can say to myself that I'm a 'normal' weight.0
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