It's a blessing that there are folks who know what precisely is right in different postapocalyptic times, on different planet.
Where people are dying from hunger - as the poorest ones are mentioned to do in and around Ikaanos - it just might not matter too much what their BMI happens to be classified along our current versatile Earth-standards.
Odd as it may appear, I'd let the Dev dictate what is considered underweight, normal or overweight and so on when it concerns his game and circumstances there.
I appreciate the sarcasm champ but as I genuinely outline in my original post I am not trying to outline what the Dev should be doing. I just saw people talking about BMI measures using the wrong terminology and so tried to make it clear what BMI measures actually are.
I genuinely think the Dev should
NOT be using BMI as a representation of the weight system and they should stick to their current vague bodytype model rather than adopt BMI. BMI is medically only a sound system when used on the group its sample size was originally drawn from, namely men of European background and this lack of universality makes it an awkward at best system, even ignoring its other limitations regarding things like not taking into account muscle mass.
The quote you posted just reinforced the irrelevancy of BMI in the context of the the game and the girls weights as far as I can tell so I am not sure what you want me to address there.
So, yeah. I appreciate you taking the time to 'correct' me. But you are arguing against a position I never held in the first place. I was just concerned with the BMI terminology being used inaccurately in thread and in the context of the discussions in thread.
I'm not disputing the thresholds you're proposing, but weight is more of a sliding scale than the sort of well defined tiers you're listing. If gaining 1 pound moves you from 29.9 BMI to 30 BMI, you didn't suddenly go from slightly overweight to obese. Part of it depends on genetics, height, etc as well. To me a better measure is whether they have visible abs, how well defined they are, and if not, how much weight they would need to lose to have visible abs. That kind of takes height and musculature out of the picture. So a girl who's a gym rat and is muscular (for a girl) could have significantly higher BMI than a girl who does not work out at all and still look slimmer. Same for guys.
Musculature is kind of a separate metric. You could take a marathon runner and a football player or body builder with the same body fat percentage (not BMI) and they would have wildly different physiques.
To clarify, these aren't thresholds I am proposing, they are genuinely are what the traditional BMI measures are, not accounting for region specific adaptions made later on as people tried to universalise the concept outward beyond the scope of its initial proposal and yes, if you were to go from a BMI of 29.9 to 30 you would suddenly go from being overweight to obese in terms of BMI as those genuinely are the thresholds that define those terms. As my reply to tsap has hopefully made clear, I am not advocating for BMI to be used as the system in game, for exactly the reasons you are describing here. Like you said, a woman who is incredibly muscular would be considered obese if we use BMI as the system and I do consider this a problem. My initial post was just to correct misconceptions as to what BMI is, apologies if this caused any kind of confusion on your part.
If I am understanding correctly then in reality we are already in agreement that BMI is a deeply flawed system in terms of conveying information about the characters and other systems would be better.