Why is my Mii spherical?

I have a Wii Fit. I bought it played it and then let it rot for a few months. Recently I decided to get it back out again. The Wii Fit uses BMI to calculate your “exercise age” and then uses your BMI to shape your Mii. If you happen to fall on the upper end of the BMI chart, it makes your Mii very spherical. If you are wondering my Mii is somewhat spherical…and this bothers me.

Like most of the populous could stand to lose a few, but I am nowhere near spherical. My birthplace and ancestry is southern German. Not this German…


But this German


I have a large frame, and large dense bones. In fact when I received a bone density scan the technician exclaimed "OH MY! You will never have a problem with osteoporosis." However, my muscles pale in comparison with the above picture, but you get the point. BMI does not take this in account. BMI is just weight. It does not take in account male vs. female, age, muscle vs. body fat or your the size (or extreme density) of your skeletal frame. So you could be a very short big boned football player with only a dash of body fat and be labeled obese.

According to the BMI charts my “ideal weight” is anywhere between 106 lbs and 116 lbs (I am 5 ft 1 in tall). If I really weighed that I would look disgusting. My big German bones would be popping out all over the place.

Why does this bother me?

BMI charts are widely used in the medical and insurance industries. This chart tells doctors and nurses how healthy you are and insurance companies how much to charge when covering you for medical and life insurance. Now granted it is not the only metric, but it is one of the main metrics…especially in the insurance universe.

So who was the asshat who came up with this…Adolphe Quetelet a 19th century Belgian mathematician. Yes, this widely used metric for health was invented around 1830, when washing your hands before surgery was just coming in vogue. Adolphe created the Quetelet Index of Obesity by dividing weight (kg) by the square of the persons height (meters). He did this because he was on a quest for the “average man”.

He believed that through a crap load of physical measurements it was possible to determine the average physical and intellectual features of a population. Through gathering the "facts of life," the behavior of individuals could be assessed against how an "average man” would normally behave. He believed it possible to identify the underlying regularities for both normal and abnormal behavior. "Average man" could be known from graphically arraying the facts of life as bell shaped curves.

Later in his work, the “average man” became the ideal. He presented as if nature was, through mutations I guess, trying to create the “average man”. Everything that was outside his normal curve were errors. Wow, that’s pleasant.

Sooo, how the hell did this guys index end up being one of the end all be all’s metrics of health? The government of course!

Before 1980, doctors generally used weight-for-height tables -- one for men and one for women -- that included ranges of body weights for each inch of height. Now granted these were still very limited because it was based on weight alone, but at least they made the distinction between male and female. BMI became an international standard for obesity measurement in the 1980s. I really don’t know how but it did. In the late 1990’s the U.S. government started pushing BMI when they launched it as a motivator to encourage healthy eating and exercise.

In 1998 the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold for BMI from 27.1 to 25 to match international guidelines. That pushed 30 million Americans from healthy to fat ass overnight. However, now if you have a BMI over 24 you are considered “at risk”, weight wise. All of this seems utterly ridiculous when looked at from afar. I have doctors, insurance companies and Nintendo telling me I am spherical…then I watch a commercial proclaiming the love for the genius who chicken fried steak. I am so torn..