Can certain obese people still have relatively healthy vitals despite their weight? That idea has floated around the internet for a few years… but a new study shows “fat but fit” is, unfortunately, a myth.

Can Someone Really Be “Fat But Fit”?

You’ve probably heard the idea before from an article or social media post — someone claims that, despite being clinically obese in terms of their body mass index (BMI) and other precipitating factors, they are still “healthy.” It’s an idea that not all obese people are equal in terms of their level of unhealthiness and predisposition to disease. And while that is true to an extent, it’s time to make sure the public realizes once and for all that “fat but fit” is a total myth.

There’s been substantial, rock-solid medical evidence for years that obesity is a primary contributing factor to all sorts of conditions and diseases that you most certainly don’t want to experience (including a shorter lifespan). However, likely as a way of rationalizing this truth with the mindset of “it couldn’t happen to me,” a dangerous idea has proliferated through the media that healthy people come in many sizes — including obese.

That’s just patently false, as obesity itself is an inherently unhealthy state to be in, and now a new study released this week has seemingly put this falsehood to bed once and for all.

The Data Behind The Study

There is a metric that doctors use to get a picture of your overall wellness called “metabolic health” — it’s a factor that includes things such as your waist size, blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and more. For a while, it was claimed that some obese people could be “metabolically healthy” despite being overweight. However, a new study out of Imperial College of London’s School of Public Health indicates that this claim is simply untrue.

Using a sample of tens of thousands of study participants, they found that even the obese people in the study who had better metabolic health than their peers were still up to 25% more likely to develop heart disease and other serious health conditions than the sample control group of 10,000 non-obese individuals they observed.

When it comes down to it, fad diets and ideas about fitness will come and go… but the classic method of watching what you eat and getting a little exercise every day will ensure that you maintain a healthy weight, and don’t have to worry about deciphering false ideas such as “fat but fit.”