Diving, Fitness, Obesity and Personal Rights

[DustyC]

You don't really want me to start listing "simple words" that people will find offensive do you? If you have never experienced mental illness or delayed development in your family congratulations but there is a population who find THAT word every but as offensive as some more racially charged words.

I'll explain it again.

I don't care. If I lived my life in a manner designed to offend nobody, I'd still fail because someone, somewhere, will get offended if I fart wrong. So I don't worry about it. People may get offended. They may not. That's on them if they want to be offended all the time. I on the other hand, don't get offended at mere words. But I'm not a crybaby. That's the difference

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

It's still a poor use of the term. I'm assuming the morons who made the decision have the full use of their mental faculties ... they simply chose not to deploy them ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[DustyC]

I fully get your point. Truly I do. People rarely get offended by simple words (when I spin the distributor on the 351 Cleveland in my 77 F-150 clockwise, I consider that I have retarded rather than advanced the timing). It's the manner in which you say them and the context in which you say them that is calculated to cause offense. You have used the word "retarded" simply to be offensive. You wanted someone to be offended and someone was. Everyone should be happy now.

I didn't say it to be offensive. I said it because it's an appropriate word for the job. One must be mentally slow to place much faith in a test that says Ronnie Cole Coleman and Kai Green are fatter than John Goodman. The appropriate tests for DM are what they already are, performance tests. I believe that getting a dead weight diver back on a boat should be included. But that too would eliminate a lot of people, and agencies like PADI would never go for that.

 

[dmaziuk]

BMI is a quick and dirty way to set a limit and decide if more invasive (read expensive) testing is needed.

Exactly. If you're an NFL player with BMI over 31, you're a "false positive". The value of quick and dirty test is to weed out the "true negatives" so that you don't waste time and money running the more accurate tests on them. There is an orthogonal measure called prevalence that tells you what percentage of the population are true positives, in this example: obese. From there you can estimate the likelyhood of whether someone with BMI of over 31 is actually fat or is a false positive.

When people use BMI to compare individuals to populations, they also make an assumption about prevalence. It usually goes unstated, nor does the statistical part: it's not that you are a cardiovascular risk, it's that there's better than X% chance that you are.

 

[tarponchik]

BMI can be misleading, of course, and not only in the case of the NFL players and alike. When I did diving from liveaboards, there were always a couple of obese women among the divers but they were young and strong and could take care of themselves. I recently watched one such woman shore diving in Hawaii. I offered her help to get out of water since she seemed hesitant, but could have offended her unintentionally. She just looked at me, then, in full gear, she jumped out onto lava with a grace of a 1.5-ton walrus and walked straight to her car.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Those who don't shore dive regularly don't seem to understand that the most physically demanding part of the dive can be getting back to your car after the dive ... which often involves walking uphill in all of your gear. I see people way heavier than me managing it on a fairly regular basis ... often in big steel tanks and with all the weight that comes with diving in 46-degree water and the requisite heavy exposure gear.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[tarponchik]

Those who don't shore dive regularly don't seem to understand that the most physically demanding part of the dive can be getting back to your car after the dive ... which often involves walking uphill in all of your gear. I see people way heavier than me managing it on a fairly regular basis ... often in big steel tanks and with all the weight that comes with diving in 46-degree water and the requisite heavy exposure gear.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I do this kind of stuff for my wife. She's not overweight, just not too strong. And a man my age needs some exercise anyway, right?

 

[DustyC]

Those who don't shore dive regularly don't seem to understand that the most physically demanding part of the dive can be getting back to your car after the dive ... which often involves walking uphill in all of your gear. I see people way heavier than me managing it on a fairly regular basis ... often in big steel tanks and with all the weight that comes with diving in 46-degree water and the requisite heavy exposure gear.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

2 friends of mine just did 28 dives in 6 days on Bonaire. One is in his mid 60s, and higher than normal bmi. It's a workout, but manageable.

 

[tarponchik]

2 friends of mine just did 28 dives in 6 days on Bonaire. One is in his mid 60s, and higher than normal bmi. It's a workout, but manageable.

Bonaire is not that hard. Maybe, only 1000 Steps and Karpata are hard for some divers, where you go up and down the stairway. I'd say, the hike to Dania Beach erojacks with full gear from the parking lot in the park is way harder than anything in Bonaire.

 

[DustyC]

Bonaire is not that hard. Maybe, only 1000 Steps and Karpata are hard for some divers, where you go up and down the stairway. I'd say, the hike to Dania Beach erojacks with full gear from the parking lot in the park is way harder than anything in Bonaire.

It's hard enough for older people. We see younger, in shape, people have issues.