A new policy by major insurance companies will use the BMI for men to calculate premiums. The BMI of bodybuilders and the BMI of athletes will mean that bodybuilders and other muscular athletes will be fined and charged much higher premiums for being "overweight." And the circumstances surrounding this policy are just ridiculous!

I never thought I’d see the day when there would be someone who couldn’t distinguish a shredded, 250 pound bodybuilder who works out religiously from a fat, 250 pound sloth who’s biggest workout comes from scrubbing the nacho cheese stains out of his wife beater. After all, who would be dumb enough to lump a highly trained athlete in with someone who never gets off of the couch except to go to the bathroom.

But the sad thing is that there does happen to be someone who is this stupid. Actually, it’s a large group of people who are this stupid and they’re called health insurance companies. Now you may be wondering why I am calling out insurance companies and there is a very good reason for this.

One by one, the major companies in the insurance industry are starting to implement a plan to charge overweight people more money for policies ranging from health insurance to life insurance coverage. And this really doesn’t seem like a bad idea at first as obese people, on the average, tend to pose a bigger problem to their insurance providers.


An underweight person like this woman will pay less health insurance than...	An overweight man like this guy and...	An athlete like this guy. Both men will pay more for health insurance, because the BMI calculates both as being obese.

Years of clinical research, as well as common sense, tells us that many overweight people have more health problems and tend to die sooner than their thinner counterparts. In fact, a recent study done in England showed that fat people typically die nine years sooner than do people who maintain a healthy bodyweight.

In addition to the benefits that this idea would provide to insurance companies, it also seems to be fair to other skinnier people who pay insurance. Why should a bunch of perfectly healthy people have to pay for a four hundred pound behemoth’s triple bypass surgery? Plus this type of thing is standard in the industry as people like smokers are charged more for health and life insurance.

However, there is a major flaw in the insurance industry’s plan to charge obese people more money and it comes in the form of how they determine who is obese. The underwriters who decide what a people’s premiums will be in order to make their company a profit are using the BMI scale, or body mass index, to decide what people will pay.

For those who aren’t familiar with the BMI scale, it is used as a measure of what a healthy body weight is in relation to one’s height. BMI utilizes a number system starting at zero and working its way up to give one an estimate of what they should weigh. The formula for determining one’s BMI using feet to measure height and pounds to measure weight is Weight X 4.89 / Height X Height.

So let’s say a 5’10” man who weighs 185 pounds wants to calculate his BMI. Using the formula and his information (185 X 4.89 / 5.83 X 5.83), this person’s body mass index would come out to 26.6 which doesn’t mean a thing unless you know the categories of the scale.

Basically, a score lower than 18.5 means a person is underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight, 30 to 39.9 is obese, and 40 and above is extremely obese. So our person who calculated their BMI earlier and found out it was a 26.6 would fall into the overweight range.

Really, a 5’10” man who weighs 185 pounds is overweight? In my opinion, unless this guy has a major potbelly and super-small muscles, he shouldn’t be considered overweight. Unfortunately, I don’t make the rules for insurance companies and this guy would be charged a higher premium than those falling in the 18.5 to 24.9 range because he is “overweight”.

So if a guy at 5’10” who only weighs 185 pounds is overweight than just imagine what a muscle-bound male pro bodybuilder who weighs 250 pounds at the same height would be charged. Well considering that since his BMI would be around 36, he would be considered somewhere in between obese and extremely obese.

Never mind the fact that his huge, sculpted physique would be the envy of most men out there and the object of women’s desires because some lame formula called the BMI says that he is totally overweight. What if his off season weight got up to 260 or, God forbid, 270! In the insurance companies’ eyes, he would be entering the world of fatassdom.

And it doesn’t have to be some hulking professional bodybuilder to yield an obesity BMI. A well-built amateur bodybuilder who stands 5’10” and weighs just 210 pounds would be placed in the obese category with a body mass index of just over 30 and also charged a high insurance premium.

Other large but muscular athletes like football players are looking at the same fate as bodybuilders are as well. Imagine a ripped, 235 pound linebacker who can run a 4.5 forty yard dash being told he is obese by his insurance company. It now begins to look like an injustice for underwriters to use the body mass index as the measuring stick.

And that’s because the BMI has no way of separating muscle mass from pure fat. This formula that insurance providers are so high on couldn’t factor in the hours of weight training, cardio, and strict dieting that certain athletes would put in each week which ultimately leads to a healthy lifestyle.

On the same token, body mass index can’t measure the poor health of a 5’8”, 130 pound gaming nerd who does nothing but eat potato chips and play online video games all day. Obviously, this person isn’t getting much exercise and, despite what their BMI of around 20 suggests, they are probably not going to be in the greatest of physical conditions.

The best evidence of this truth came from a series of 40 studies done on 250,000 test subjects in which the people performed exercises on a treadmill. The studies concluded that people who had normal BMI’s but weren’t fit ran double the risk of cardiovascular disease than the so-called obese people who were fit.

Another thing to consider is that the body mass index concludes that only a BMI under 18.5 is considered underweight. So this means that a 5’11” person with a body weight of 135 would be just above the 18.5 range and considered normal. But I’m sure that many people would agree that for a guy, 5’11”, 135 pounds is a normal build for a middle school boy but not for a grown man. Most women at this height wouldn’t ever get this slim even if they dieted and exercised regularly.

It almost seems as if the BMI was conjured up by a bunch of those fashion show types who think that anyone whose ribs aren’t showing is fat. The truth is though that it was invented by a Belgian mathematician named Adolphe Quetelet during the years of 1830-1850. This brings to mind a good question: Why is the insurance industry using a formula created in the mid 1800’s to measure healthy weights?

One might wonder if there are some better alternatives for determining who should pay a higher insurance premium and, yes, there are better methods and they revolve around testing for body fat percentage.

The Dual Energy X-ray Absortiometry, or DXA, is considered the most accurate. Two different types of X-ray scan a person’s body and one is searching for all tissues while the other searches for everything except fat. A computer then subtracts the second picture’s findings from the first which then gives an accurate measure of fat.

The Body Average Density Measure is the next method and, before the DXA, it was considered the most accurate method. Basically, it measures a person’s average density (mass divided by volume) and then applies a formula to come up with a body fat percentage. To find this, a person is put underwater in a tank and then some complicated calculations are made.

Another way to find body fat percentage is the skin fold method in which a pinch of skin is precisely measured by a set of calipers at several points on the body in order to come up with a person’s subcutaneous (fat under the skin) fat layer thickness. This test doesn’t do a great job of finding a person’s total body fat percentage but still seems like a better test of a healthy body than the BMI.

Actually, all three of these methods are better and way fairer to insurance payers in terms of determining who should have a higher premium based on body type. But the major problem is that they cost money and insurance companies are only looking for the cheapest way possible to set people’s premiums.

And the BMI measurement certainly seems like an extremely cheap method to make this determinant. Money is the only thing insurance companies’ care about and they definitely don’t mind stepping on the toes of well muscled athletes in order to get to their goal of making a profit. So, until this greedy industry comes to its senses, be prepared to have to literally pay for your hard-earned muscle gains in the future.