In my 15 years’ experience with thousands of corporate male clients in a purely preventive practice
*average BMI is just above 26, when we know that it should be 22-23
*eyeballing the average male gives me a picture of usually over 20 and often about 25% body fat
* the vast majority of clients recall a trouser size of 81 cm at young adult best, and the average on presentation is above 90 cm
*most of these folk show some form of at least one metabolic derangement, and often more
*There is a huge pool of sub-obese overfat individuals with various derangements who merit treatment by body fat reduction who are being left with a mistaken impression that, because their standard measurements such as BMI, waist, waist:hip are within range or only marginally high, therefore their health behaviour is not worthy of some remedial body fat reduction
*I suggest that body fat % via eyeballing and comparing the THEN to the NOW is probably the most practically effective method of identifying these clients
*Apart from comparison of weight, BMI, waist and waist:height , there also be merit in applying 80% weight gain is fat gain and ¾ cm=1kg fat gain algorithms
*The more concordant these are with the results of the eyeballing method, and vice versa, the more power to the conclusions
*Some might say that impedance or ADP measurement of body fat % on presentation is possibly a good idea, but it means comparing the result of a more accurate method with the recalled/eyeballed method, and conclusions are only as valid as the least reliable statistic; and even these sophisticated methods have their own systemic and measurement errors as well
*So perhaps it’s better to use just eyeballing?