OMG. If they are fat, I am obese.  With news like this and others like the one about Model Stephanie Naumoska, who is 1.8 m tall and weights 49 kg, getting into the finals of Ms Australia Universe contest, what do we expect next? That all people with a BMI above 15 should be sent to the obese training camp?!?! 

French think they’re fat

The Straits Times, April 23, 2009

PARIS – FRANCE has by far the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe, but only half of them think they are too thin, according to a new study.

In other European countries the opposite is true: the number of women in Britain, Spain and Portugal, for example, who see themselves as seriously skinny easily outstrips the number who actually are.

‘This shows that what people consider an ideal weight in France is lower than in other countries,’ said the study’s author Thibaut de Saint Pol, a researcher at France’s National Institute of Demographic studies, which published the study Wednesday.

‘If a French person who feels fat were to go to the United States,’ – which has much higher rate of obesity – ‘he probably wouldn’t feel fat anymore,’ he told AFP in an interview. [LOL]

The study also reveals a big gap, both objective and subjective, between sexes.

In western Europe, the mean weight of men in every country except France and The Netherlands tips the scales into the ‘overweight’ category, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) standards.

By contrast, in only three nations do women join the menfolk in crossing that line: Britain, Greece and Portugal. And only among the Dutch does one find more overweight women than men.

France is the one country in which both sexes are solidly in the ‘normal’ weight bracket, and the only one in which more than five per cent of women are offically ‘underweight’. — AFP