r/fatlogic oct 2014 ========== http://i.imgur.com/anzsKZU.png 400lb man doesn't think that BMI applies to him because he's got so much muscle. (i.imgur.com) submitted 4 days ago by Believeitormaybe ----- jeffp12 His lean mass ("If I had absolutely zero fat") is 195 pounds. That is mass of bones, organs, muscles, everything other than fat. That's lean weight, not "my total muscle." He's 396 pounds. So he's 201 pounds of fat. His target weight for that height is around 136 pounds, so he's maybe got 50-70 pounds of muscle, not 195. edit: by "target weight" I mean low-end of ideal-weight that he listed by saying "my BMI says as a 6' tall 34 year old man, my target weight is 136-185." I'm not saying he should weight that much, I'm trying to deduce the muscle mass he has. --- DiscoR This should be at the top. The wording is fucked up in the image but the guy isn't necessarily wrong. 195lbs LBM isn't crazy for a 400lb 6ft tall man. It's probably still off, because its pretty high, but its possible. Even if it is wrong its probably only high by 10-20 pounds at most. It takes some muscle to move around a 400 pound body. And of course he's still morbidly obese. --- Deflatermice Back before I lost weight I did all the tests with a trainer, and my lean body weight put me really close to or over one of the overweight categories. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I strutted around for a week because I thought there was some 180 lb Adonis or something under the fat. --- wushuwaffles I'm pretty sure the manga says his belly is just blood not fat and he actually has a very low fat percentage. [this made me chuckle, this is some comic book reference] --- Fishyswaze This is the proper way to skip leg days. Get really fat for a while then slim down. Boom never do legs again Thanks science. [i'm saving humor comments over fluff comments] --- neutralpiehotel2 Plus the weight of the extra skin. [brr *their skin is TRASHED*. ever seen them after they lose a few hundo, and then before and after skin removal surgery? brrrr] --- Penny_girl Agreed, 195 LBM isn't crazy for someone 400lbs. But apparently he doesn't realize as he loses weight, he's gonna lose muscle, too, not just fat. It's incredibly difficult to lose significant fat without losing muscle, too, especially because he won't need that much muscle to carry a smaller/lighter body around. --- perfectdesign To add to this, I have spoken with the personal trainers that use the body fat analysis machine that he used and they let me know that it's not very accurate on obese people. It works by sending electrical signals through your feet and kind of guesstimating based on resistance and with an excess of fat, it just doesn't do well. --- WandaTrade Fat guys tend to think that if they used to be in sports, they're always just as athletic as they were years ago. I live in the South, so this is real common with guys who played football (our most holy of traditions) in high school. --- neutralpiehotel2 This was definitely me. Former competitive gymnast. Even though I'd gained 30 pounds and could still do handstands, I couldn't actually do anything else, I couldn't even run half a mile, and I lost a huge portion of my muscle. But I still considered myself an athlete. It wasn't until I decided to start getting back in shape that I realized how delusional I had been. --- enelson1991 This is my stepdad. He is overweight but still thinks he is as in shape as he was when he playes football in high school. He would get really mad at me whenever he would see me lifting more weight than him because... reasons. This kind of puts it in perspective for me. [going back with knowing what i know now...] --- Kernya He seems to believe that once the muscle it's there, it's there forever. #fatlogic. Like all those people failing diets and exercise routines, they probably think they just need to do it once and it's there forever, that it's not a lifestyle routine that should be continued. --- NekoFever "Why do you need to go to the gym? You're fit already!" --- Believeitormaybe[S] I wanted to reply to him but I couldn't muster any words through my wtf. When people think it's only fat girls that are delusional about their bodies they forget all the fat men who think they're so incredibly strong. [you KNOW buffmartins are calling fat guys "men".] --- hotpocketweightloss I don't think that fatlogic from men gets addressed enough. I think it's because being a big guy is a desirable social trait from a lot of standpoints, and it seems that it's not as important to women for men to be "hot", so they just revel in their gluttony, ignoring how unhealthy they actually are. I realized that I didn't actually have a lot of muscle at 260 when at a non competitive bench press competition (lol), the other guys in my weight class were more than twice as strong as me, were taller, and had better body composition. Smaller guys than me who were on par with me or better strengthwise looked ripped and huge, and they were ~50-80 lbs lighter. I wasn't a "big strong guy", I had just deluded myself into thinking that. --- DL_McGee That idea, that they're secretly "big, strong dudes" can also be dangerous. Fat guy comes into the gym. Has ILS, stares down all the lean guys. He racks 275 on the bench, cause he probably did that as a warm up in high school. Immediately pins himself, so me and another guy have to bail him. --- DL_McGee "Imaginary Lat Syndrome" - Where a guy's imaginary lats are so huuuuuuuge he can't put his arms down; something not tough guys use to look tougher and stronger than they are. --- jimforge Yeah, as a big kid and then big guy, plenty of people assume I'm some sort of beast at lifting things. Started wrestling as a freshmen in high school, so we lifted every week day. Started doing bench, gauged max. I could do about 95 lb, weighed in at about 250. Now, I never assume I'm some sort of beast, but that assumption that big = strong is very wrong, we just use momentum to compensate. --- mashedpotatoes_52 not to mention eating eating ungodly amounts of red meat in considered "manly". well,until you get a heart attack --- mashedpotatoes_52 Im so manly my arteries punched me --- Bloke_Named_Bob At uni I noticed an over-abundance of fat guys who insisted that they were stronger than me simply cause their body was larger. They got very defensive when I implied that fat doesn't actually improve your ability to move, it just gives you more momentum once you start. --- boatsnprose Yeah, the only ones that are accurate are done with expensive, expensive equipment. I do calipers as a trainer, but not so much for the bf percentage as I do it to know how much bodyfat is lost over time. I hold a lot of water, and I tested my bf with the handheld and it measured me at 23% when I was lean as hell with abs and everything...so I threw that thing at the wall and decided they were definitely worthless. --- UCgirl Yeah, I've had very lean trainers use them on me and they preface it by saying "it's given me readings that were five percentage points different" so I take it with a grain of salt. That's when they themselves were probably around 10%...that's a huge margin of error. But for trending it can be useful. That's how I look at my ei scale at home. --- phjorg 195lbs lean at that weight from a former lifter is perfectly reasonable.. Why are you having trouble with this?? It's well known bmi is poop stat for lifters. [BMI originally had NOTHING to do with "health" or "doctors", so idk why it's still used, it was never intended for that purpose. on that note, same with USA social security, it was NOT originally intended to be a personal ID system, now we have dead american SS numbers given to illegals so they can be hired by companies. crazy.] --- archaicfrost The logic of "I did a bf% test and my lean mass is X% therefore I have way less to lose than I thought!" is a piece of fat logic that really bothers me, it's something my gf does all the time too. Not only does lean mass include bones, organs, skin, hair, and other tissue, but the thing people forget is that in order to lose all that extra fat mass YOU WILL LOSE SOME MUSCLE MASS! Sure there are things you can do to improve muscle sparing action and maintain the majority of it, but when you are cutting you will lose fat AND muscle, the goal is to just make most of it fat while minimizing how much muscle you lose. The method should be: use BMI to determine healthy weight range, determine desired BF%, then calculate what percentage should be lean mass and what percentage should be fat, then just cut until you get there. Just because you think you'll be to thin at the healthy weights on a BMI chart doesn't mean you know what you are talking about - your weight should be lower than you think it should be, just like your squats should be deeper to actually hit parallel than you think when you're doing them. --- HamUniverse BMI is simply just mass divided by height^2, with categories defined by the WHO to give an idea of the generally accepted normal/healthy weights for a given height. Doesn't say anything about body fat percentage or lean muscle mass, or account for variations in racial characteristics that result in more/less muscle, denser/larger skeletal frames etc. That said, even the most hardcore powerlifters will probably top out around a BMI of 40, pro bodybuilders maybe low 30s because they have extremely low body fat %. Plenty of these fat activists that use bodybuilders as an example of why BMI is wrong have BMIs themselves of 50+ --- Sunny_In_Ireland Related tale. My dad has been losing weight, awesome! He's lost 50 pounds and seems way happier and every time he hits a new goal he seems more determined. Now for the fatlogic, his stomach has always been hard, he had a big hard potbelly. My mom poked it in the kitchen and made a remark about how the hardness is muscle and the fatloss is revealing more muscle, dad laughs I guess he accepts this as it's a nice thing to think you have muscle despite not having done any form of real exercise for 30 years... I had no idea what caused hard bellies since fat=soft, right? Well it turns out that hard pot bellies are indeed fat, visceral fat. This Visceral fat is hard and is the dangerous kind of fat that squishes in between your organs and can interfere with them, such as dramatically increasing risk of Type 2 Diabetes. So then I had to sit down with my dad and explain that his hard belly is not his muscles showing through but rather a very tell-tale sign about his health. He took it in stride asked if there was anything specific he needed to do, I said no you're already doing everything right you just have to keep going. [knowing what i know now... there's bio sludge in there. brr] --- boatsnprose Powerlifters aren't the old-school type fat guy these days. Fuckin Danny green is built like a god and he's a straight up powerlifter. [oh yeah, that's something that changed over the decades] --- boatsnprose Oh they do, but they're also juiced to the gills. I know what you're saying though. They're world-class athletes and this guy's delusional. === rcvrd jan 2021