"I may be fat, but I beat my eating disorder"

[Razzle]

And I highly doubt that point.

Why?

Far more people die every year due to obesity and issues relating directly to being overweight than they do to being underweight.

Far more people die cycling than crocodile wrestling, because far more people regularly cycle than regularly crocodile wrestle. The same is true here. If every overweight person became anorexic tomorrow, the rate of very early death (say, before age 45) would dramatically increase. The percentage of those in each category who die prematurely (and HOW prematurely) is what matters for the kind of conclusion you're driving at, not the raw numbers.

Looking at it another way, you're not likely to survive to the point where your body weight gets 90% lower than what it should be. You are likely to survive way beyond the point at which your body weight reaches 90% HIGHER than what it should be. 

A friend of mine has a teenage son with severe anorexia.  It has been a depressing ordeal for his family.  The kid is not concerned with his appearance, he has convinced himself virtually all food is either unhealthy, contaminated or tainted somehow.  The prognosis is not good.

That's orthorexia nervosa. It's worth them looking it up and making sure he's getting appropriate therapy and not being treated by someone who only understands anorexia.

Alex K
Exactly, and I think this is why Napoleons post reinforcing that pissed me off a bit even though he may be right in principle.

I think you guys are in denial to be honest. I don't look at that image and see someone who looks like an image of healthiness. I see someone who looks a tad overweight.

I'm not saying she looks disgusting, or that she's obese, or that she looks massively unhealthy. Just that she isn't the ideal of health that kids should, at least in my opinion, be aspiring to.

I could easily, and probably quite cheaply, play the 'Americans are used to seeing more fat people, so it's considered more normal' card. I honestly think seeing super fat people on a daily basis, even in places like the UK (we're the fattest nation in Europe if I'm not mistaken) can warp your ideas of what should be considered as healthy. I mean, by today's standards, she's not like some super lard arse, and I wouldn't by any means say she particularly needs to lose weight or say she's anything but normal. But I would be lying to myself if I said she looked 'perfectly healthy' like you guys are.

Yes, there are studies confirming that phenomenon.

http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v38/n5...3154a.html

http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a494

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...164116.htm

Here's one.  Looks like it's healthier in the long run to be a few pounds overweight than underweight.  This was a followup to a 2005 study that came to the same findings.  Sorry if someone else has already posted this, I haven't read every post in this thread yet.

Interesting. I notice it's the first thing that comes up in google too, from a quick search of the term "overweight is healthier".

There's a few factors this study doesn't seem to address.

BMI is a notoriously bad gauge of how healthy someone is. A study based entirely on assessing people via BMI is not one I'm inclined to find compelling. The study didn't take into consideration many other factors, like general fitness levels.

The best argument I could see being made from this, is that skinny people can be just as unhealthy as overweight people. Something I've never denied. Or maybe, just maybe, using the BMI scale is a terrible thing to use. The very fact that the study is based entirely on BMI just makes it null and void from the start.

I don't have time to find the studies right now, but again, you're right there. In the last few years research has found that when you directly compare how people are classified by the BMI to how they're classified by body fat measuring tools, the BMI is shown to be VERY unreliable, not just for highly muscular people but for many of those classified as "normal" who have a high body fat percentage and low muscle tone and bone density.