I was at 7% (measured on a fancy scale, not the bathtub method) as a male high school long distance runner and I was basically a fastish skeleton. I don’t think that would be a healthy BMI for me twenty years later, even if I could maintain it!
Good question. It’s very likely safe to assume that we have an adaptive variance for these kinds of things, but it would still be a very small range. If you’ve heard it, it was probably supported by a study that indicates that correlation. For the most part, it’s something you’ll almost never even see. Iirc, the minimum healthy, functional bmi for men is 5%, 12% for women, as I was taught years ago. Anything below those ranges and things start to get weird, or it would take great effort and water/diet restrictions to maintain. The point being, anyone who says they’re 0%, or even like 3%, has no idea what they’re talking about. Thanks for having this discussion with me!
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I think that some bodybuilders get to close to that minimum at competition, but they’re also really close to death. And a few have died due to the side effects of the drugs they take to get down that low (esp. diuretics). This might be different now though; HGH has been doing weird things to pro-level BBers. Used to be that they’d use shit like 2, 4-dinitrophenol (DNP), which does really weird shit to your metabolism and can very, very easily kill you if you dose too high. Especially since it takes about two weeks for that dose to catch up to you.