Recently, a patient in his 40s, a busy banker and father of two little ones, showed up at my clinic, completely stressed out. The day before, he finally took the blood test he had been putting off ("who has time for that?"), and the results kept him up at night. Even before stepping into my office, he pulled out his phone from his shirt pocket and thrust the screen at me, filled with concern.
The red numbers staring back at him, thankfully, didn't reveal any serious health issues: they were relatively mild disruptions in fasting sugar levels, "good cholesterol" and free blood fats. 2 View gallery ( Photo: Shutterstock ) However, the scientific reassurance didn't quite calm the emotional storm he was in. "Honestly, I just don't understand how this could be," he said in frustration, "my weight is completely normal!" Welcome to our new medical game show: "The Fat in the Mask.
" Contestants: men and women aged 18 and over, with a normal BMI (between 18.5 and 24.9 kg/m2, or about 18.
5 to 24.9 lbs/ft2), but with a high body fat percentage (more than 35-30% in women and more than 25-20% in men, depending on age - see table below). In the world of medicine, attention toward this puzzling population is growing, and the accepted term to describe them is NWO - Normal Weight Obesity.
The problematic use of BMI as the sole index for defining obesity has been discussed before, and the enigmatic phenomenon of "skinny fat" people is a prime example of this. The term NWO was first coined about.