What BMI do you consider to be fat, slim or skinny?

[waschunky]

Nc for this. Inspired by a family chat about size and what is considered the ideal now compared to when I was a teen in the 90s. Teenage Dd was saying how big bums and very chunky thighs are the ideal whereas I'm mentally in the idealised thigh gap era and an arse that's not got its own postcode.

It's obvious from reading threads on here that what is considered obese, overweight, slim, skinny, underweight varies and doesn't necessarily follow the BMI scale. What classes as fat now? When I was a teen fat was probably actually obese and now those obese are often deemed a little chunky or stocky. Normal bmi is seen as skinny by some. I never hear the word plump anymore. Pleasantly plump was how my sister referred to herself and she was at the top end of a healthy bmi maybe half a stone over the top end.

I'm not sure if I could accurately assess someone's size and weight against clinical parameters. There was a programme on tv yonks ago where participants were asked to say which outline they thought was theirs and they always chose the one that was one to two sizes bigger.

Views are probably skewed by the media but to me obese is still very fat, overweight is a little chunky, normal weight I've no idea, slim would be thigh gap, collar bones and cheek bones visible, skinny would be something I'll never be 😁 and probably in my mind is actually clinically underweight.

BMI 24.5
size 8
I look small but not particularly slim yet (very short).

Bmi 20 but not slim. Look very average.

Mine is over 25. I don't think I look fat. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5302575-aibu-to-tell-you-that-bmi-doesnt-apply-to-everyone?page=4 (scroll do about 1/3 of the way).
I am not skinny by any stretch but I think it would be also a stretch to say I am fat.

To me “fat / skinny” has nothing to do with BMI and everything to do with how a person looks.

That’s true, very many women complain about middle-aged men and their pot bellies (and rightly so in my opinion, yuk!). It’s an interesting point. Very few people will genuinely find fat people more physically attractive because evolution has ensured humans have natural instincts to prefer a healthy partner.

Of course in individual cases personality or chemistry may outweigh physical attractiveness and mean a someone finds a fat person attractive regardless of their appearance (and then of course there are the outliers who have a fetish for it, and some cultures where there was/ is social or cultural conditioning which convinces people being fat was preferable due to mystical/ religious beliefs, or historically in societies where food was scarce being fat was considered to be a sign of wealth), but generally speaking when based purely on visual appearance the vast majority of people of either sex have evolved not to find this an attractive quality.

It’s similar to why people find more symmetrical faces more attractive because in evolutionary terms that is an indicator of being healthy/ free of disease. These most basic norms of what is considered beautiful in terms if physical characteristics are consistent across time and culture, although fashions etc change enormously, because they are rooted in millions of years of evolution designed to ensure that people choose healthy mates who will be capable of producing, raising and protecting children.