From my friends in Germany or France and Denmark, places I reside often: no one is fat. Simply absolutely no one.
Perhaps you are bad in reading: emphasized that for you.
I'm sitting in a beer garden atm. Only one person is objectively fat. Two or three have a big belly.
That does not look plausible.That would mean a huge deal of Germans would be hiding in their rooms all day long and no one ever sees them. I just came back from my first vaccination. Used the local train. No one was objectively fat in that train. A few would have not been my taste, but that was all of it.
First of all, congrats on the first vaccination! I'm getting the second shot on Saturday. Also thank you for taking the time to reply!
Yes, I wondered if that was what you meant... literally seconds after posting my answer :)
When I lived in Rheinland-Pfalz (2006 to 2016), I saw quite a few people almost at the "mobility scooter" level of morbid obesity. Some of my German friends were so large that I couldn't touch my hands when hugging them. This is a level of obesity I had only seen in the US, UK and Luxembourg before. There is definitely a bit of regionality in it, as RPL is pretty close to the bottom of rankings for healthy living in Germany.
I have since moved to France, in the North-East, and I've seen quite a few fat people around but indeed not many at obesity or above. On top of my head, I've met two in the last 5 years... one freshly retired and one in my age band.
The thing is that the weight of the entire occidental population has been creeping up for the last three centuries and it has sharply accelerated in the last three decades. Simply based on what's surrounding us, what we now consider normal used to be overweight and what we now consider skinny used to be normal. A bit like the story on how to boil a frog... if it's a progressive change over decades, we tend to not notice it. The persons with the big belly in your beer garden would probably have been considered fat/obese 40 years ago and the "objectively fat guy" would have been called a land whale (or local equivalent).
For an example of the change in decades, a study on German conscripts from 1956 to 2010 shows that 28.4% of the 19 years old conscripts in 2010 were overweight (19.9%) or obese (8.5%). For comparison, the 1984 cohort only had 13.7% of overweight (11.6%) or obese (2.1%) conscripts. It roughly matches what I've observed over time in the places where I've lived.
The "fat" kids I went to school with would definitely be considered normal sized by the general population nowadays and the skinnier ones would prompt a visit from social services on suspicion of malnourishment at home. It may sound silly but I had never seen moobs before watching Fight Club, I've seen them in the streets since. Same think with cankles or back-boobs... I had never seen them prior to the early 2000s. Serving sizes have crept up, people eat fast food more often than back in the 1980s. At the same time, a large segment of the population is becoming more and more sedentary. More calories in, less calories out...
From where do you get such ridiculous numbers?
Freely available on the rki.de website, on the OECD website and on many other places. Germany is roughly in the middle of the "Europe" group for obesity (quotes added as both the UK and Turkey are in the same statistics group), not the best but also not the worst.
If you use sane metrics, as kg for weight and cm for height: the "normal weight" is size in cm - 100 -> as kg. So a 160cm person has a normal weight of 60kg. Perfect weight is 10%less - and for women it is another 10% less.
No idea what BMI actually is.
You've described something relatively close to BMI, except even more flawed than BMI. First, it doesn't scale up or down very far... it gives a close estimation for average height people but fails on kids, or really short/tall people. Second, women bodies requires about 10% more body fat than men to function properly (not less as in your "perfect weight calculation"). BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by the square of your height in meters. A BMI below 18.4 is underweight, below 14.9 is critically underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 is normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight, 30 to 34.9 is obesity 1, 35 to 39.9 is obesity 2, above 40 is morbidly obese. For your average sedentary person, a BMI outside the normal range tends to be a good indicator of health risks.
For example, your 160cm person at 60kg is in the normal range but getting close to overweight. That same person at 54kg (your -10% for perfect weight) is roughly in the middle of the normal range. That same person at 64kg has crossed the overweight line. That same person at 77kg has crossed the obesity line. At 90kg, that person reached class 2 obesity and would hit morbid obesity at 103kg.
No one is using it here. It is considered a "useless metric" :P
No one except your doctor, your Krankenkasse, the Bundeswehr, the Statistisches Bundesamt, Eurostat, the OECD, the WHO and so on. TK (as a German Krankenkasse example) uses a slightly modified scale for BMI, skewing right for age and lumping anything above "obese" in one group.
While I agree that BMI is useless for outliers in the data set and shouldn't be used as a single measure for an individual... it is still a good initial risk measure for 95% of the male population (and 99% of the female population) and a good statistical measure at the population level. A body fat measurement (not with impendence devices, those are junk) will take care of the finer details for individuals. Dexa scans aren't exactly cheap, so there's a cheap proxy measure used first (like BMI and a couple of questions or a waist measurement).
I'm going to take myself for one side of the "outliers" explanation. At my current muscle mass, I'd be in the middle of the overweight range if I dropped to 10% body fat. 10% is the amount of body fat fitness models cut to for photo shoots... the ones where you can see pretty much all muscles and veins under the skin. Competitive bodybuilders temporarily drop to 5% and below for competitions... for just a couple of days usually. 5 years ago, the 10% body fat would have put me squarely in front of the obesity line... I had to reduce weight lifting and can no longer run after surgery, so I've lost some no longer used muscle mass. I could obviously drop more muscle mass by fully giving up on weight lifting and eventually end back in the "normal" BMI range, but being able to pick and carry really heavy stuff without injuring myself is too damn useful.
The other side of "outliers" would be the low lean body mass people... colloquially known as "skinny fat". If you don't have a lot of muscle mass (through lack of exercise), you can be in the "normal" BMI range and still have an unhealthy body fat amount.
