13 ms·

So the average American woman looks like a ball chair, basically? Something is wrong with your data here :)

by 988747 4y ago

alistairSH 4y ago
The average women's clothing size is now 16 or 18 (up from 12 or 14 in 2010). It corresponds to about a 38" waist. Average height is around 5'4", which has been mostly consistent over the last 20 years. That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.
- adrianN 4y ago
  I wonder how useful averages are since you can be (almost) arbitrarily fat, but die very quickly when you're even a little underweight. I guess the minimum waist size for an adult female is still double-digit inches, but I wouldn't dare guess the maximum waist size.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Oh yeah, as noted in parallel comments, averages are terrible for things like designing airplane cockpits, and I imagine crash dummies as well. Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38". I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Note that a 10" shorter waist is only about 1.5" on a side (diameter of 9 inches vs 12) which is noticeable but not as much as "10 inches" would make you think.
      - Blahah 4y ago
        That difference is visually absolutely vast - for the same height, in most sizing charts, it's approximating a 50% increase in body mass.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      I was at Boeing when the cockpits were redesigned to accommodate women: 1. lower control forces 2. shorter legs 3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash) With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem. Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.
  - noodlenotes 4y ago
    In case anyone is curious > In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb. > For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb. I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese. [1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/ https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this or attempting to guess the weight of strangers, but this gender breakdown seems a bit odd to me— in my circles and community exposure (west of Toronto), I would have imagined that most guys fell into a 180-220 bucket, and most women into a 120-150 one. So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  You can't get an idea of what Americans are really like by watching the media. You have to come here, travel around and see for yourself. Specifically, the media rarely shows fat people. Not the truly fat ones, with the exception of the freakshow genre of TV specifically about extremely fat people. In recent years they've started to show more and more fat people, but not nearly fat enough to give you an accurate impression of average Americans. Just fat enough to give token representation of fatness. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. The people on those shows are freaks because they have freakishly little shame and agree to be on TV.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. Not really. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV are pretty rare even in America; if they were at all common then there wouldn't be much of a market for such shows in the US ("you're just gonna show me ordinary people like me? yawn.") You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, and they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are fit by European standards.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, Have you been to Ohio? That ratio is flipped. "Plump" is merely overweight but not obese. In states like Ohio, plump seems athletic because the massively obese are very common. You can easily see several 500lb people a day, fat enough for any TV freakshow.
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        > Have you been to Ohio? Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas. > several 500lb people a day Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them. Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese. Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  A 38" waist would make someone about a foot or two wide (12.1 inches assuming a perfectly circular waist, but most folks' waists are wider than they're "long") - which is curvy, sure, but not severely so. Average waist size for European women is around 30", for reference - so only a couple inches less wide. Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    A simple quadratic model would suggest a 60% weight increase of the 38" over the 30". That's enormous.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      A "simple quadratic model" is about as appropriate for extrapolating human weight from human dimensions as a microwave is appropriate for cooking steak.
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        Definitely not optimal but it gets the job done? /s Do you have any better model to recommend?
        yellowapple 4y ago
        Not really; indeed, my point is that body metrics are surprisingly difficult to model given the wide variances. You could probably get closer to an accurate model by identifying the fixed weight of an adult's skin/bones/organs. Going from critically emaciated to fit would mostly entail adding muscle, which is denser than fat. From there, the proportion of added muscle v. added fat when increasing waist circumference would be the deciding factor in accurately estimating weight; that proportion is highly dependent on the individual and one's level of daily activity.
    - porknubbins 4y ago
      From the bodybuilding literature I’ve seen weight and body part circumference changes are a little more linear than what you’re suggesting. Though there may be some people who you can model as spheres.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Average fitness levels vary a lot with region, if you stick to a few trendy coastal cities you might get the impression that most Americans are fairly fit. But if you travel across America a few times, I think you'll find that ball-shaped is actually quite common.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I wonder at which size it makes more sense to put radius on clothing...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Even the ideal woman isn't actually a sphere, or even a cylinder, no matter what the physicists say.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      She is if she's in a vacuum.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's one of those bi-modal distributions, I imagine. Centers For Disease Control: > "The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%)."
michaelt 4y ago
170 lbs 5'4" looks like this: https://height-weight-chart.com/504-170.html https://height-weight-chart.com/504-170.html Certainly not an athletic build, and a borderline-obese BMI, but well short of ball chair territory.
- AllegedAlec 4y ago
  That's really fat though.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    While it's not an athletic build, the grandparent poster thought it was so high as to call the accuracy of the data into question. While the kind of Americans whose careers put them in front of cameras are rarely so mighty, from what I've seen of the real American population those photos look about average.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Maybe if your only exposure to other humans is Hollywood actresses, but in the US those photographed people look pretty normal, and in the rest of the world those people would be somewhat curvier/plumper than average but not unreasonably so.
    - bad_good_guy 4y ago
      Fatter. Why use euphemisms to avoid using the term "fat" when it's literally the case. It shouldn't be considered a loaded term, Americans need to admit they're fat instead of constantly moving the goalposts
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        I'm sorry for not using your arbitrarily-preferred synonym for "plump". Like, if you're literally incapable of recognizing the difference between those photographs and, say, the folks on My 500 Pound Life or whatever "Learning" Channel drivel you watch, then maybe you ain't the one to be lecturing anyone about "constantly moving the goalposts".

So the average American woman looks like a ball chair, basically? Something is wrong with your data here :)

by 988747 4y ago

So the average American woman looks like a ball chair, basically? Something is wrong with your data here :)

The average women's clothing size is now 16 or 18 (up from 12 or 14 in 2010). It corresponds to about a 38" waist. Average height is around 5'4", which has been mostly consistent over the last 20 years. That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.

adrianN 4y ago
I wonder how useful averages are since you can be (almost) arbitrarily fat, but die very quickly when you're even a little underweight. I guess the minimum waist size for an adult female is still double-digit inches, but I wouldn't dare guess the maximum waist size.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Oh yeah, as noted in parallel comments, averages are terrible for things like designing airplane cockpits, and I imagine crash dummies as well. Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38". I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Note that a 10" shorter waist is only about 1.5" on a side (diameter of 9 inches vs 12) which is noticeable but not as much as "10 inches" would make you think.
    - Blahah 4y ago
      That difference is visually absolutely vast - for the same height, in most sizing charts, it's approximating a 50% increase in body mass.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I was at Boeing when the cockpits were redesigned to accommodate women: 1. lower control forces 2. shorter legs 3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash) With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem. Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.
- noodlenotes 4y ago
  In case anyone is curious > In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb. > For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb. I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese. [1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/ https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this or attempting to guess the weight of strangers, but this gender breakdown seems a bit odd to me— in my circles and community exposure (west of Toronto), I would have imagined that most guys fell into a 180-220 bucket, and most women into a 120-150 one. So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
You can't get an idea of what Americans are really like by watching the media. You have to come here, travel around and see for yourself. Specifically, the media rarely shows fat people. Not the truly fat ones, with the exception of the freakshow genre of TV specifically about extremely fat people. In recent years they've started to show more and more fat people, but not nearly fat enough to give you an accurate impression of average Americans. Just fat enough to give token representation of fatness. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. The people on those shows are freaks because they have freakishly little shame and agree to be on TV.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. Not really. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV are pretty rare even in America; if they were at all common then there wouldn't be much of a market for such shows in the US ("you're just gonna show me ordinary people like me? yawn.") You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, and they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are fit by European standards.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, Have you been to Ohio? That ratio is flipped. "Plump" is merely overweight but not obese. In states like Ohio, plump seems athletic because the massively obese are very common. You can easily see several 500lb people a day, fat enough for any TV freakshow.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      > Have you been to Ohio? Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas. > several 500lb people a day Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them. Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese. Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
yellowapple 4y ago
A 38" waist would make someone about a foot or two wide (12.1 inches assuming a perfectly circular waist, but most folks' waists are wider than they're "long") - which is curvy, sure, but not severely so. Average waist size for European women is around 30", for reference - so only a couple inches less wide. Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  A simple quadratic model would suggest a 60% weight increase of the 38" over the 30". That's enormous.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    A "simple quadratic model" is about as appropriate for extrapolating human weight from human dimensions as a microwave is appropriate for cooking steak.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      Definitely not optimal but it gets the job done? /s Do you have any better model to recommend?
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        Not really; indeed, my point is that body metrics are surprisingly difficult to model given the wide variances. You could probably get closer to an accurate model by identifying the fixed weight of an adult's skin/bones/organs. Going from critically emaciated to fit would mostly entail adding muscle, which is denser than fat. From there, the proportion of added muscle v. added fat when increasing waist circumference would be the deciding factor in accurately estimating weight; that proportion is highly dependent on the individual and one's level of daily activity.
  - porknubbins 4y ago
    From the bodybuilding literature I’ve seen weight and body part circumference changes are a little more linear than what you’re suggesting. Though there may be some people who you can model as spheres.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Average fitness levels vary a lot with region, if you stick to a few trendy coastal cities you might get the impression that most Americans are fairly fit. But if you travel across America a few times, I think you'll find that ball-shaped is actually quite common.

ilyt 4y ago
I wonder at which size it makes more sense to put radius on clothing...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Even the ideal woman isn't actually a sphere, or even a cylinder, no matter what the physicists say.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    She is if she's in a vacuum.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's one of those bi-modal distributions, I imagine. Centers For Disease Control: > "The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%)."

michaelt 4y ago

170 lbs 5'4" looks like this: https://height-weight-chart.com/504-170.html https://height-weight-chart.com/504-170.html Certainly not an athletic build, and a borderline-obese BMI, but well short of ball chair territory.

AllegedAlec 4y ago
That's really fat though.
- michaelt 4y ago
  While it's not an athletic build, the grandparent poster thought it was so high as to call the accuracy of the data into question. While the kind of Americans whose careers put them in front of cameras are rarely so mighty, from what I've seen of the real American population those photos look about average.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Maybe if your only exposure to other humans is Hollywood actresses, but in the US those photographed people look pretty normal, and in the rest of the world those people would be somewhat curvier/plumper than average but not unreasonably so.
  - bad_good_guy 4y ago
    Fatter. Why use euphemisms to avoid using the term "fat" when it's literally the case. It shouldn't be considered a loaded term, Americans need to admit they're fat instead of constantly moving the goalposts
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      I'm sorry for not using your arbitrarily-preferred synonym for "plump". Like, if you're literally incapable of recognizing the difference between those photographs and, say, the folks on My 500 Pound Life or whatever "Learning" Channel drivel you watch, then maybe you ain't the one to be lecturing anyone about "constantly moving the goalposts".