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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

For many healthy people, losing weight to reach a government ideal of 'healthy' means dropping useful muscle mass. Which is not good.

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What. 90% of people do not have any musculature worth talking about. Where are your sources? For 99% of people losing weight will be the problem

Brings to mind the MRI scans of the thighs of an elderly athlete versus an elderly sedentary man https://www.bettermovement.org/blog/2012/use-or-lose-looks-l...

The Army Sergeant Major of the British Army is 'overweight', for example. (He's done interviews about it.) That's obviously nonsense and he doesn't need to lose any weight at all. The idea of 'overweight' is meaningless.

Is he jacked, or fat?

If he's jacked, then yes of course he doesn't need to lose weight. That is a tiny proportion of the population though.

He's jacked, but the original comment was 'losing weight to a target healthy weight is always [ALWAYS] good'. It sounds like you agree that's a false statement?

The original comment was making a generalization that was pretty fair considering that the proportion of the population that has enough muscle mass to cause them to be 'overweight' is pretty small.

Obviously "always" is wrong. Almost nothing is absolute.

> Obviously "always" is wrong.

Bingo.

Since most people are average, there is an average "healthy weight" target. Of course individually, it's really about the ratio of lean mass to fat.

If you define many as like 2% maybe.

GP said 'losing weight to a target healthy weight is always good'. 'Always' is not true.

Well, encumbering "losing weight" with a bad method like losing muscle or breakfast cocaine or cutting fat off your belly with a knife to do it isn't an attack on losing weight, but a misunderstanding of their claim.

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