This article is more than 1 year old

FATTIES have most SUCCESS with opposite SEX! Have some pies and SCORE

'Healthy' weight not only not healthy, it stops you getting any

Yet more great news today for those assessed as fatties by the now massively discredited Body Mass Index (BMI) system: you're probably more successful with the opposite sex than your undernourished contemporaries.

We learn this from a new study by trick-cyclists in California, who surveyed 60,058 heterosexual men and women mostly resident in North America. The researchers asked the respondents their height, weight and the number of sexual partners they'd had, among other things. Knowing a person's height and weight permits one to calculate their BMI, and BMI values place a person in various bands: Underweight, "Healthy"/"Normal", Overweight and Obese.

The stand-out finding from the research was that, if you're a man and all other things being equal, the best BMI band to be in for success with the ladies was "Overweight". Being "Obese" is not a problem either, unless you're way out into the super-obese bands; the regular just-obese blokes in the survey still did rather better with the ladies than "healthy" weight chaps did, and the fatties were streets ahead of the "underweight" skinnies.

"It may be initially surprising that more overweight men reported the highest number of partners," comments David Frederick, psychology prof. "[But] it is important to note that the medical classification of overweight does not necessarily map onto social perceptions of overweight ... Men who appear somewhat larger, more powerful, or more athletic generally report more sexual experiences than other men."

It's of course one of the major flaws of the BMI system that it tends to classify tall and/or muscular people as fatties, since it assumes that healthy weight should scale up in relation to the square of height - a patently absurd idea, as we've discussed on these pages before. The BMI bands have also not been adjusted to cope with the way that western populations have increased seriously in height, even in quite recent times.

All this has meant that hugely greater numbers of people have been spuriously classifed as "obese" and "overweight" - and in turn it has become the case among tall populations that "overweight" is now actually the healthiest band to be in, not "healthy".

Worldwide, almost two-thirds of the "obese" people are female, so perhaps it's not surprising to find in Frederick's study that the misalignment of the BMI bands in sexiness terms is even worse for women. The best band for a lady to be in for pulling purposes, the survey revealed, is actually "Obese": severely-obese and "Overweight" women tied for second place in the boudoir stakes. "Healthy" women were well behind the "fat" ladies, no matter how fat, and the "underweight" were simply nowhere.

The key table from the study can be seen here, or the full paper is available here courtesy of the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

So there you have it. Chaps - should you be an unfortunate, spindly specimen in the "healthy" band or below, which is actually not healthy at all - get a few pies down you, and the ladies will flock round. Certainly if you combine the pie-scoff campaign with a few trips to the gym, anyway.

And for our female readers, even being "overweight" may not do the trick - you might need to hit the cake and let your belt out a notch or two more than that, for ultimate boudoir success. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like