Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.
> If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.
This is kind of an absurd metric. You can be at ~20% BF (which is by any standard a healthy percentage - some studies show best all cause mortality outcomes in men at 22%) and still not have visible ribs or lats with one arm above your head.
Different people carry weight differently as well, no visual test like this is going to be blanket accurate.
That is not health advice, that is "how to be anorectic" advice. If you are at the weight with longest lifespan, you are somewhere at the top of "normal" bmi range and wont see ribs. You wont seen them in the middle of "normal" range and plenty of thin wont see them either.
Otherwise said, for quite a lot of people accomplishing this would mean underweight.
Underweight is less healthy the overweight.
It’s unnecessarily crude heuristic but it’s not totally wrong. It seems like you can see ribs in adult men up to around 25% body fat which is around the end of healthy range.