Further to my post here about how arbitrary the BMI calculator is as an indicator of whether a particular person’s weight is healthy or not, have a look at Shapely Prose’s BMI slideshow. The Flickr set is interesting too.
The slideshow is made up of photos of women, with a note underneath indicating whether they are underweight, normal, overweight, obese or morbidly obese according to the BMI calculator. I found it really interesting. There isn’t very much common ground between my idea of “overweight” and “obese” and the BMI calculator’s. It’s fairly clear to me that most of the “overweight” women in that slideshow would have to be very thin indeed to get into the “healthy” range, and whilst I can see that some of the women in the “obese” and “morbidly obese” categories are bigger than average, and might be described as “overweight” in that sense (assuming that there is a “weight” to be “over”), I am not sure that I would apply the “obese” label to any of them.
