the-psoriasis-treatment

John Stone is a bodybuilder and founder of a bodybuilding and fitness web site ( ). There he has provided pictures and stats of his remarkable transformation, which were used to prepare the montage below. John’s height is reported as 5' 11.5". Below the photos are the months in which they were taken, the waist circumferences in inches, the weights in lbs, and the waist-to-weight ratios (WWRs). Abhi was kind enough to provide a more detailed plot of John Stone’s WWRs ( ). Assuming that minimizing one’s WWR is healthy, an idea whose rationale was explained here before ( ), we could say that John was at his most unhealthy in the photo on the left. The second photo from the left shows a slightly more healthy state, at a reported 8 percent body fat (his lowest). The two photos on the right represent states in which John’s WWR is at its lowest, namely 0.1544. That is, in these two photos John minimized his WWR; at a reported 14 and 13.8 percent body fat, respectively. When w...

Most of the empirical investigations into the association between body mass index (BMI) and mortality suggest that the lowest-mortality BMI is approximately on the border between the normal and overweight ranges. Or, as Peter put it ( ): "Getting fat is good." As much as one may be tempted to explain this based only on the relative contribution of lean body mass to total weight, the evidence suggests that both body fat and lean body mass contribute to this phenomenon. In fact, the evidence suggests that carrying some extra body fat may be healthy for many. Yet, the scientific evidence strongly suggests that body fat accumulation beyond a certain point is unhealthy. There seems to be a sweet spot of body fat percentage, and that sweet spot may vary a lot across different individuals. One interesting aspect of most empirical investigations of the association between BMI and mortality is that the participants live in urban or semi-urban societies. When you look at hunter-ga...

In my previous blog post, I argued that one’s optimal weight may be the one that minimizes one’s waist-to-weight ratio. I built this argument based on the fact that body fat percentage is associated with lean body mass (and also weight) in a nonlinear way. The fit2fat2fit experiment ( ), provides what seems to be an interestingly way to put this optimal waist-to-weight ratio theory to test. This is due to a fortuitous event, as I explain in this post. In this experiment, Drew Manning, a personal trainer, decided to undergo a transformation where he went from what he argued was his fittest level, all the way to obese, and then back to fit again. He said that he wanted to do that so that he could better understand his clients’ struggles. This may be true, but it looks like he planned very well his experiment from a marketing perspective. His fittest level was at the start, with a weight of 193 lbs, at a height of 6 ft 2 in. That was his fittest level according to his own opinion. At...

There is a significant amount of empirical evidence suggesting that, for a given individual and under normal circumstances, the optimal weight is the one that maximizes the ratio below, where: L = lean body mass, and T = total mass. L / T L is difficult and often costly to measure. T can be measured easily, as one’s total weight. Through some simple algebraic manipulations, you can see below that the ratio above can be rewritten in terms of one’s body fat mass (F). L / T = (T – F) / T = 1 – F / T Therefore, in order to maximize L / T, one should maximize 1 – F / T. This essentially means that one should minimize the second term, or the ratio below, which is one’s body fat mass (F) divided by one’s weight (T). F / T So, you may say, all I have to do is to minimize my body fat percentage. The problem with this is that body fat percentage is very difficult to measure with precision, and, perhaps more importantly, body fat percentage is associated with lean body mass (and also wei...