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It is also belied by the fact that top athletes don’t seem to be vegan.
I know it’s totally anecdata but it’s significant to me that I’ve never, ever met a vegan who is healthier than me.
Because of my social and professional circles I’d bet a mint that I’ve met and interacted regularly with a lot more vegans than the modal person. So it’s not a sample size issue.
I’m not the perfect picture of health but I’m certainly “robust” in more than one way. I have a lifetime of on again off again strength training, extreme sports, endurance sports, outdoorsmanship, martial arts and manual labor . But I’m too poor and too busy to be a consistent athlete, and probably too undisciplined to boot.
But still, every vegan I’ve ever met I could almost literally break them into pieces.
To wit, I believe the poster in question said he was six feet tall and 150lbs, which to me even if you are endurance athlete is not “healthy”. I’m the same height and in my best shape I had almost a hundred pounds on him, even with literally zero body fat I’d weigh more.
I know it’s a joke on the whole ‘sigma grindset’ to say “If you can’t physically overpower me I don’t have to listen to you” but when it comes to diet & excercise, I’ll say “This but unironically.”.
You were literally obese in your best shape and you are casting aspersions on other people's health?
235 at 20% body fat is not obese, I had a ton of musculature and a tiny belly. I looked like a gorilla. I was doing 10 mile runs in the mountains on the regular and could deadlift almost three times my body weight.
If I had bird bones I’d be obese but I’ve never had a problem with getting enough calcium or putting enough eustress on my body.
150lbs at 6 feet tall you’d look like you just been interrupted halfway through your stay at Auschwitz.
235 at 6 foot is 31.9 bmi. this is obesity. Every guy on the Internet seems to be 20% BF, but they can't all be right.
150 at 6' is pretty skinny but not Auschwitz tier (myself, I'm 155 at 5'8" and of course 20% bf). It's a 20.3 bmi - this is what a normal American looked like before the obesity epidemic.
You’re right on the BMI scale, but the above poster wouldn’t qualify for most reasonable measures of obesity. BMI is good for population obesity measures, but quickly falls apart when you start seriously weight training. And a 3x body weight deadlift (at 235 pounds!) is extremely far to the right tail of the population strength curve; Strength Standards calls that an ‘elite’ lift (1), and it’s comparing to a population of people who actively train for strength. I would feel confident suggesting this is something that less than 0.1% of the population can do.
Now, I also think it’s likely that the above poster was using PEDs to support supraphysiologic muscle mass, as well. Not to cast aspersions, but merely to point out that with chemical assistance it’s certainly possible.
You’re right about 150 lbs / 6’ not being close to Auschwitz level, but it’s also a little insincere to suggest that it’s a ‘normal’ body weight. At 20.3 BMI, it’s less than 2 points from being underweight (18.5). At least in our society, I think it would commonly be agreed (as you say) that that’s pretty darn skinny.
For a personal anecdote, I’ve been both 130 and 240 pounds (at 6’3) and while the former was extremely skinny, the latter looked very good (as a bodybuilder, 10% or so body fat and yes, PEDs) despite being the cutoff for obesity according to BMI.
1)https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/deadlift/lb
I wasn’t on PEDs although I understand why that would be an assumption, anyone I’ve ever talked to with a background in this straight up told me I’m a weird outlier in terms of bone density, including my childhood doctors.
Took me a better part of two years to achieve that training 3-4 times a week.
I was also pretty laser focused on getting my deadlift as high as possible, and started off my powerlifting journey with high lower body strength as I had formerly trained as a cross country runner, and was an avid cyclist and amateur martial artist (kickboxing).
It’s really amazing what you can achieve when you’re consistent and keep your goals very narrow.
Huh. Interesting. I’m happy to believe you, but yeah, that makes you a weird outlier.
So does achieving that kind of deadlift in only two years, especially with a former endurance background. That makes it gaining strength harder, not easier, as you’ll have turned more muscle fibers into Type I fibers. All the same, good for you! I wasn’t built to deadlift; my proportions are wrong for it. Bench press and squat were better for me. That said, I got my strength total as high as I wanted it. After a point, powerlifting felt not worth it any more for me. My body hurt, and I didn’t want to keep bulking to become competitive at my height.
Do you still deadlift or lift competitively?
No, shortly after I hit my max deadlift of my life I got married, spent a lot more time working and started a family. I had a lot less time to train, so I just hit the gym as much as needed to stay reasonably strong and have a good QOL.
I feel like we have opposite proportions, as even at my strongest o could barely do more than my body weight on the bench. I always preferred shoulder presses but it’s quite a bit harder to press heavy. I had a decent squat but nothing to write home about. Clearly, I was born to deadlift.
Nowadays I mostly just do novice level Mountain biking and keep my Muay Thai skills alive, go on the occasional long hike or bike ride. I’m still decently strong for someone approaching middle age with a desk job, and I go on a lifting tear once or twice a year for a month or two just to keep the fire alive.
I have the feeling I’ll get back to it when my kids are grown.
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If that guy was on PEDs, the health posturing is even more bizarre. Never met a guy on PEDs for his health.
He was about fifteen pounds above under weight. That's a pretty normal bodyweight.
A BMI of 20.3 is 5th percentile for all Americans (for easy statistics). Women are much more likely to be very low BMI than men; what do you suppose that makes him? 3rd percentile? I’m pretty comfortable with calling that far on the left tail of body weight distribution.
I’ll agree with you about the PEDs; he claims to not have been though. It’s believable enough, though makes him a bit of a freak. Still, they do exist, so who knows?
Only a quarter of men are normal bmi or less, so just not being overweight puts you in the 25th percentile.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adults-1882-1986
Eyeballing that first bar graph, 20.3 was the average BMI of military academy students at the end of the 19th century. It's difficult for a modern American to understand just how normal it used to be to be lean.
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I'm not entirely sure top athletes are a good argument for any regime, because a lot of the very top ones where money is on the line seem also to be doping and other unhealthy behaviours.
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