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by kelipso 601 days ago
There are plenty of people who do weightlifting or have high muscle density. Probably more than 10% of people and certainly not edge cases. Doctors are basically taught like undergrads are taught, not much critical thinking involved, they just recite whatever is in the relevant document they are supposed to recite from.
2 comments

I really doubt more than 10% of people do weightlifting and have high muscle density. It's likely closer to 0.1% which is why BMI is a good guideline over a group.
being within an "ideal" or "average" bodyfat range will easily put you as overweight on BMI.

it's a useless statistic.

Doctors are much more likely to let obesity slide than they are to nag you about BMI when you're clearly in shape in my experience.
The problem is not so much what the doctor will tell people in person but that these same people will end up in stats and should be separated into their own category. Having a high BMI and that excludes strength trainers would make high BMI stats worse than it is already.
Those people do skew the stats by a bit, but they are outnumbered by the people who are "skinny fat", i.e. people who are very sedentary and who have high body fat but still have normal BMIs due to having very low lean body mass.