The Most Attractive Body Fat for Men Will Shock You (NEW STUDY)

[00:00] What is the most attractive body fat percentage for men? If you're dieting to super low body fat levels in the hopes of scoring some action, picking up a donut might be wiser instead.

[00:13] Wouldn't it suck if like you felt your best at 12%, but women loved you the most at 3%. They don't prefer shredded people on average. If I just get to 12 and a half percent body fat, I'll be the optimally attractive you're leaving 90% of attraction on the table still.

[00:27] Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength. What is the most attractive body fat percentage for men? We have that and more because we're reviewing a study today.

[00:39] The study is called the relationship between body fatness and physical attractiveness in males by fun, gia and colleagues. Let's dive super deep to see what's going on here

[00:52] because if you're dieting to super low body fat levels in the hopes of scoring some action, picking up a donut might be wiser instead. What? I like, love your donut.

[01:07] I like your donut. You're like, well, it's donut are you from this or for some part of my body? Are you literally mean my donut? Let's find out. All right, so first what was the basic research question that the study was asking?

[01:19] They were trying to find out if people rate male attractiveness as peaking at a specific level of body fat or body mass index. Rather than do they think leaner is always better?

[01:34] Because leaner is better as something that a huge fraction of fitness males think, but that may or may not be the case. Another question is is body fat percent a better predictor of attractiveness or is BMI a better predictor of attractiveness

[01:49] or is the shoulder to waste ratio a bigger predictor of attractiveness? So is it some of the do women or other men like men to be leaner? Or is it really like as long as they're not too big

[02:02] because that BMI measures size? Or is it really like if your shoulders are super wide and your waist is super narrow? Like even leanness and BMI don't matter much. It's all about shape. So great questions there.

[02:14] Another question is like does the best looking BMI line up with what from evolution we were predict is like the healthiest most robust BMI because like low 20s all the way to mid to high 20s

[02:26] and BMI seem to be what evolution would predict is like the healthiest BMI. We don't know if people actually prefer that in the sexual attractiveness of males or not so we'd be finding that out. Another thing is this study tested folks in China

[02:40] or as I like to pronounce it, China. Scott, how was that pretty good? Pretty good. Not to you, what brother? Not thought we won World War II. Lithuania and the United Kingdom.

[02:52] That's right. It's not the United Kingdom. It's the, you know, eight kingdom. 18 letters missing there. So we have three different countries and are there going to be any differences

[03:05] in ratings between those countries or is this like if all three countries are basically the same, we can start to suspect they're like, oh there's like a pretty good deal of cultural universality to this, which means maybe it's more biological

[03:17] as to how people identify who's attractive and maybe less cultural. And they got men and women to rate the bodies. So men were rating how attractive the men are and women were rating how attractive the men were.

[03:31] Maybe there's differences between them, maybe not. Now, how do they do this? What was the study design? They had 283 university recruited participants from Beijing.

[03:44] It placed in Lithuania that looks like one of the vegish or some shit like that. Lithuanian languages practically like incomprehensible and Aberdeen.

[03:56] And so China, Lithuania, United Kingdom and they had both male and female raiders and plenty of them. So it's not just females assessing males, it's males assessing males as well. Scott, remember you and I filmed that pilot

[04:09] called males assessing males and CBS said that not only was it insanely in poor taste, that this was an entire category they had never even requested for us to submit. Yeah, but we got a published elsewhere.

[04:22] We shared did. Next up, the stimulus, right, the testing protocol was every rater, male and female received 15

[04:34] black and white dexabody images of real people. All of these people were men, all of their faces were blurred and the height was not shown. So really we're talking about just black and white

[04:48] dexabody images where you can see shape. You can see body fat like on the periphery and that's about it. These men who were in these 15 pictures

[05:02] ranged from 5.9% body fat for the leanest of these males to 37.2% body fat for the fattest of these males. And that corresponds to a body mass index

[05:14] the lowest of about 20 and the highest of about 34. Big broad range, which is great because it can really tell us some differences. And the core predictors here, the independent variables are going to be body fat percent, body mass index

[05:29] shoulder to waist ratio, which is really easy to figure out. And the really cool thing is that these images represented three groups of five images ranked by adiposity.

[05:42] So there was five people on the leaner side, five people and images on the moderate side and five people and thus images on the heavier side on the fatter side of things. So that's kind of cool because it wasn't just random people.

[05:56] It was very distinct and the whole spectrum was covered, which is awesome. The primary outcome measure was attractiveness rated by ranking the cards in a sorting task.

[06:08] The experimenters told the subjects to say, OK, you have 15 cards, right? Because each card is a picture of a male with a certain body fat percent, certain dexascam. I want you to sort all of them in a way

[06:21] that the first one you put down is the most attractive. The second one is the second most attractive all the way down to where the last one is the least attractive. And this is a pretty easy sorting card to do.

[06:33] A sorting game to do 15 is just not that many to sort. And you pretty quickly find out where it goes to one end or the pile goes to the other, then you do a couple comparisons like this, this, that, and it's good to go. It's not perfect and we'll talk about limitations

[06:45] to study later, but it's a really, really good start. For the comparators, we're comparing attraction in this study ranked across different body fat percentages and BMI levels and looking to see if we can have a peak.

[07:00] We're also comparing whether body fat percent or BMI or shoulder to waist ratio are the most predictive of what people rate as most and least attractive. And of course, we're going to compare against genders of sexes of who did the rating to males and females

[07:14] or praise male physiques differently and countries of the world do Chinese people Lithuanians or the people who have the greatness of Britain among them are they going to be saying some body fat and some muscularities are different than others.

[07:29] They also have an evolution based model, that predicted a certain BMI range would likely be chosen. So let's see if that one checked the box as well. All right, here are the results, what actually happened. Body fat percent showed a peaked relationship

[07:44] with attractiveness with the middle levels rated the highest. Remember, we had five lean people, five moderate people and five fatter people, the moderate category one.

[07:56] The middle levels were rated the highest and the very lean folks and the very fat folks were rated substantially lower. Next, the most attractive male bodies seemed on average to cluster around 13 to 14% body fat.

[08:13] And I'm going to say that again, in this study and we'll bring in other studies later when we discuss this in more depth, 13 to 14% body fat was rated as most attractive by hundreds of college aged women by the way

[08:28] as well as college aged men. This is a big deal just by itself. We'll talk about it in just a little bit. BMI also had the same peaking relationships with 23 to 27 BMI being the best scoring across all

[08:42] of the different sizes of bodies. The shoulder to waist ratio showed a rough peaked of about 1.57 so shoulders being 1.57 times

[08:55] as wide as the waist that's distinctly wide or shoulders and waist, but some folks in the sample were even more extreme and they didn't get the favorable votes. So 1.57 seems to be kind of a little bit of a maximum there

[09:09] where people really prefer a distinct shoulder to waist ratio but it's not the more the merrier after that. When body fat percent or as it's known as an opacity and amount of fat you have

[09:22] and shoulder to waist ratio were considered together, body fat percent explained more variance across all three populations. Let me put that to you in non-science speak. How lean you were, or in this case moderately lean,

[09:36] explained more of people's attraction to you than the shoulder to waist ratio, both are important but leanness is more important. You guys, this is really good news because it's much easier to change how lean you are

[09:49] than to change how wide your shoulders are and how narrow your waist is. Those are related but not entirely related. Here are some country nuance. In China and Lithuania the shoulder to waist ratio

[10:02] didn't add much once body fat percent was considered but in the United Kingdom both mattered. So the United Kingdom folks looked more closely at shoulder waist ratio as well as body fat percent

[10:14] and BMI but body fat percent still mattered more in the United Kingdom than shoulder to waist ratio. Very interesting. And here's something that actually really blew me away. I was not expecting this result.

[10:27] These are not fitness industry people mind you but males and females doing the rating rated roughly the same statistically undifferentiably to who was attractive and who wasn't based on what body fat BMI and shoulder waist ratio.

[10:40] So like all the 15 people they had to sort, pretty much everyone did roughly the same job between the two genders. I would not have seen this. Scott, would you have seen that coming? I thought that the guys would just make all the shredded dudes and the shoulder to waist ratios of a million the hottest.

[10:53] Nah, I think we're biased with our fitness lens but in the real world, if you see someone 13% body fat and you don't train, you're like that dude shredded. Yeah, guys are good shape.

[11:05] That's true, if you don't train a lot of work there. All right, so what did the authors think all of this meant? A couple of points. People seem to prefer moderate male fatness,

[11:18] not extremes of fatness or leanness. The fatness extremes we saw coming, the leanest extremes is bit of an interesting thing. At least in this stripped down kind of body's only setup,

[11:30] this is what people prefer. Add opacity otherwise known as fatness appears to be a more reliable cue for attractiveness than shoulder to waist ratios.

[11:42] That means that pushing especially combined with a fact that extreme shoulder waist ratio has showed no benefit. If you have a choice between being a little bit leaner versus being a huge massive shouldered, super tiny waisted freak,

[11:54] the being a bit leaner is a good thing. Now, I'm saying a bit leaner, but I really should be saying it like that. Being close to about 13% to 14% body fat pays more dividends than a massive shoulder to waist ratio.

[12:08] The other thing is this, it turns out the best body mass index, the degree of all overall body size, did match evolutionary predictions, which is really cool. So it looks like humans choose what is most attractive to them,

[12:20] highly based at an implicit, very unconscious feeling that comes from evolution. When you see someone super hot, it's just kind of automatically that you think they're hot. You're not doing any kind of formal analysis.

[12:32] You're not like, oh, let me see her shoulder waist ratio. It just either feel it or you don't. That's deep, inbuilt, evolutionary logic that executes automatically without your consent. Actually, this is some of the stuff I talk about in my upcoming new book, The Aesthetic Revolution.

[12:47] As a matter of fact, Scott, can I pimple the book? Take it up. Ta-da. It's a going on sale mid-June and we'll throw a pre-sale link into the bottom of this video, see when it comes out.

[13:00] But you can buy it. And basically, I talk about a lot of stuff, mostly sort of three things. One, practically, how do you get lean and jack to be your best-looking self? Two, is what kind of cool, amazing technologies

[13:12] and innovations are coming down the pipeline to help us get more lean and jacked and better looking. And three is a bit more of an emotional component of like, should people focus on their external appearance or is that toxic and bad I get into all that stuff?

[13:24] But one of the things I get into there is the fact that people appraise others because of their attractiveness isn't even conscious. People do it subconsciously. And so when folks say, well, you just have to change your perspective like, yeah, but it's not my perspective.

[13:37] It's like somewhere deep in my brain, it's built in. Just the same way here, people picked who they thought was attractive and it really lined up with evolution, which I suppose not surprising, but really, really cool news.

[13:49] The interpretation, the researcher, basically, the researchers had was that people are judging on kind of survival, health, fertility cues, subconsciously, of course, but not on just who is the most jacked

[14:01] and who is the most lean cues. Which is kind of an interesting thing for us and fitness to hear because we get a little carried away with extreme sometimes. They also did in the discussion section,

[14:13] they highlighted a bit of a difference. Females seem to prefer the males that are likely to be most fertile and healthy, 13 to 14% fat, but in most, not all rating situations, males prefer females that are slightly thinner than that

[14:27] and that remains an open question as exactly what that means with evolutionary psychology. They also did something really cool, which we'll talk about a little bit when we discuss this just shortly, is that they acknowledge that real life attractiveness

[14:40] is just very multifaceted. You got the face, you got the shape, you got the swag, you got the outfit, you got the talk, you got the everything else. And so it really, this is just a small part of attractiveness.

[14:52] There's nobody saying that body fat percent is the only thing you get rated on, not even close. It's a small part, but a significant part. All right, so what do I think that the study did well,

[15:04] what are the strengths? There's a bunch. The abjective body composition is amazing. Dexcellent data avoids entirely that while everyone guesses body fat wrong problem, because we know exactly what their body fats are.

[15:16] They're not asked to guess about body fat in just attraction. We already know the body fat. Amazing that they did cross-cultural sampling, we get China, we get Lithuania, which is Eastern Europe and UK, which is Western Europe. So like we got Asia, but big part of Asia,

[15:28] we got Western Europe, Eastern Europe, that's a lot of diversity. And it blessed you test the robustness because if every single result came back completely differently from all the countries, you'd be like, man, it's really cultural and really country specific. But because the results are almost identical

[15:41] from all the countries, it looked like, oh, interesting, man, really a lot of people all around the world, both male and female, by the way, kind of prefer a really well-understood thing. They did a great job of separating the variables.

[15:54] They had three shoulder to waist ratios, three at opacity and three BMI ratio levels basically. It's a very clear design to try to test the extremes and test the middle. Instead of just getting a weird random sample

[16:06] and we learn nothing from that. They did great job at reducing confounds. They blurred the faces because otherwise, you cute people would just be getting better ratings and then people would say that's body fat-related. They removed the height, which is really important.

[16:18] Removing height's a big deal because height's a big deal in attraction. And they did black and white pictures so that there's no skin tone effects or anything like that, although in dexas typically, you can't assess skin tone anyway, so no big deal.

[16:31] They had both male and female raiders. It's double the participants, which is annoying, but because it's a one-time rating task, it's not that annoying, it's just really cool. It allows us to really examine what are males looking for

[16:43] versus what are females looking for. Wonderful, wonderful if they did this. They also had a hypothesis ahead of time. They put their money out where their mouth is and they said, hey, evolution predicts that a mid-range BMI is gonna be the thing

[16:56] and we're gonna test that. They weren't just like trying to fish for data which is totally cool if that's how you do your study, but they had a hypothesis which is really neat to see. And the outcome, the testing variable

[17:08] was super simple, super intuitive. Sort by attractiveness is really easy for participants to figure out. It's super easy to interpret. It has some drawbacks, but like it's really, really robust. So this is all really great stuff.

[17:21] Now, the study did have some weaknesses and I'm not picking on the folks that did the study. Every study has weaknesses almost by design because you can only do so many things. Well, otherwise you're just trying to solve the whole world all the months. First, there were, and this is something

[17:34] you might have thought of yourself already, there are only 15 images of the body. Scott, that can't possibly represent enough variation to conclude ton, right? Like, there aren't 15 body shapes in the world.

[17:46] There's like 150 at least to paint a really good perspective. Now, you can't do a sorting task with 150 that would take 10 hours. 15 is limited. Any one guy's proportions in there can sway the set.

[17:59] Bones structure, muscle distribution, fat distribution, even at the same percentage, could heavily sway the curve at least enough to give us not as precise of a measurement as we wanted. Another thing is like an external

[18:12] and ecological validity problem. You're seeing people with x-ray vision and people don't really assess their mates with x-ray vision. You don't have a dexascant in your face. And so it's great for isolating shape,

[18:24] but it's ecologically a little bit weird. Only fat on the sides can be seen in a dexa, at least visually. Not fat on the abs or chest or anything like that. And those are very big missing pieces

[18:36] because ab fat and especially male facial fat are huge cues for women, but they're not included here. Women like some jawline.

[18:48] They like some cheekbones. And they like some ab and oblique outlines. None of this is visible in these dexas. This is just bodies only and only from two dimensions. Different guys will get their best jawline cheekbone

[19:02] abs situation at different body fat percents. One guy will need to be 9% fat in order to have that nice chiseled face look. Another guy will need to be at 19% fat only

[19:14] and he's already got well ahead on the chiseled face situation. So for those guys, their optimal body fat percent for attraction, and it's very different. Because imagine you're the guy that's 19% fat

[19:26] and you have a pretty chiseled face already. If you get down to 9% fat, women think you're in skeletor and there's something wrong with you. If you're 9% fat and you're leanest and you're like, oh, the study said 14% was great.

[19:38] You're at 14%. You got a fat little round little kid face. Some women aren't into that sort of thing. So something is definitely missing from the facial fat situation. The sampling is different. These were younger folks more educated. They're the university students.

[19:52] They're not representative of the full country's mating market. These also were not fitness people, which is huge remember. If you want to be taking muscle mommies home from the gym, may you gotta think it through

[20:04] and be like, okay, is this exactly the same thing that they want versus what I have to offer? Now, generally speaking, altering how you look for hose as they're known colloquially, you know, disrespect,

[20:17] is not a good idea to begin with. But if you're really into a certain thing, you know, that certain thing likes you to look a certain way and you like to look a certain way, you're good to go. Here's what I mean by that. If you're into like hardcore fitness girls

[20:29] and you are into hardcore fitness yourself and you think you look best at 10% fat, they might agree with you or enough of them do that you'm saying you can date one of them and then she's great. She loves your abs. It's all awesome. The average girl likes a guy who's 14% fat,

[20:43] but you're not dating the average girl anymore. You're not interested in the average girl. So that's something to keep in mind. Another thing is the ranking task is awesome, but it's forced ranking in no ties. So some people could have been roughly the same,

[20:55] but they were forced to rank them, which means the differences between body fats might actually not be as big as we think. It just, they had to rank them one way or another so that came through in the data. It's not a terrible thing, but it's definitely a thing.

[21:08] If you let people rank equally on some, you could see a huge cluster of like, these guys all look roughly the same to me, which means that it wouldn't be like all anywhere between 11% and 16% fat is really good.

[21:20] It's going to actually mean like, it's not just anywhere between these is really good. It's the name of between them really just doesn't matter. Like that would be really insightful versus if they rank them and they met the rankings. And actually, you know, 11 and 12 are the best.

[21:33] 13, 14 not as great and 15, 16 maybe not as great because they had to rank them. Here's another thing. Muscularity isn't clearly separated here. BMI can reflect muscle or fat. The DEXA helps but with only 15 images,

[21:48] it's hard to isolate like does this person have a higher body fat percent but more muscle or a lower body fat percent, but less muscle. The structure sort of does that, but if you blur the face and you can't tell the height, it gets really confusing as to how jack they really are.

[22:02] It's some you can tell to some extent because of the muscle shape, but not as much as maybe we would like. If you got their body weights on there, it could tell us a lot more, but then it's not a shape test. It's a body weight test and it gets more complicated.

[22:14] Now, this is not, this is a weakness of the study in the sense that if this study was trying to sort in the real world, what really matters the most, but it wasn't. And so this critique is a little bit,

[22:26] not a say a little bit of a cheap shot, but just is not really a critique of the study. It's just for us to remember. There's missing context here. There's no clothing, there's no posture, there's no evidence of grooming or lack

[22:38] there of little scraggly beard versus clean cut look. There's no movement. How you move your swag is a huge part of attraction. There's no voice, right? Do you, are you, are you like, hey guys, I'm out, are you, are you, are you, are you, are you?

[22:51] That does different between different women and has an optimum somewhere. Status cues, do you have a $15 trillion watch on and do butlers just follow you everywhere you go? Or do you live in a trash can? That's a big deal.

[23:03] Personality vibe is huge. And you know, like is this person a cool person I can relate with, man, that's a big deal. And all of these are absent, they matter a ton. The study did not try to say that these don't matter,

[23:15] but just in case you're confused and think, if I just get to 12 and a half percent body fat, I'll be the optimally attractive. You're leaving 90% of attraction on the table still. All right, in the real world,

[23:27] what is the male body fat attractiveness optimum? I'd put my money on this. It's very likely about 13-ish percent fat. And it's exactly where we'd expect to land

[23:39] an evolutionary grounds of maximum health and maximum muscle enablism, which is actually really cool. So notice, your best body fat for bulking in most cases

[23:51] is 10 to 15%. Your best body fat for health is 10 to 15%. Your best body fat for feeling good day to day and like vibing and having mental energy and physical energy and recovery and just being happy

[24:04] versus diet miserable is 10 to 15% and hey, check this out. The average female and male prefers you for that good old-fashioned, you know what?

[24:16] At 10 to 15%. It's neat. It would really scot wind it suck if like you felt your best at 12%, but women loved you the most at 3%.

[24:28] Yeah. And some of us in the fitness industry probably think that's the case, but it is not remotely the case. So this is actually really awesome. How do I translate this to the real world? After you finish contest prep or 12 week diet,

[24:42] and you go and like go to bars and clubs and hit on women, that's not your best time to be hitting on women. When you're off season just vibing and you're at 11 and a half or 12 and a half percent,

[24:54] that's actually the time when you're most attractive. So that's really cool, which is just really, really awesome. It's very likely from this data set that the average woman peaks at lean athletic preference,

[25:07] which is, you know, if you don't think 13% as lean athletic, you're delusional fitness industry person like me. It's the first time I hear that I'm like 13% fat, but I've gone insane. They don't prefer shredded people on average.

[25:19] Some do, but mainstream girls don't typically go for veins and striations. That's a real thing. Another thing, it's very likely not just a number. The looks is a checklist.

[25:31] Jawline and cheekbones showing, which may occur a fatter or skinnier for you depending on who you are. Waste clearly smaller than shoulders. No belly overhang and some ab visibility

[25:44] without that dehydrated competition face look is what females are looking for on you to be the most attractive. If you check all those boxes, man, you're really good. And I'll get to that later

[25:56] because you could be prioritizing your shit some other way if you've checked all those boxes. If not, you can still check more boxes, go to town if you like, for a reasonably trained person, a reasonably trained man, facial fat, belly overhang,

[26:11] et cetera, shoulder to waist ratio, all that stuff I just said probably peaks somewhere between 10 and 17% body fat with the center of mass about 12 to 15% body fat,

[26:23] which means if you have genetically a fatter face going down to close to 10% body fat will really, really do good things for you. If you genetically have a very lean face and very good body proportions, being closer to 17% body fat

[26:35] is probably going to do you much better than getting freaky lean and having weird jaw lines and people run scared from you. It is almost certain that having more muscle shifts that entire window upward.

[26:47] So if you are more jacked, if you have a bigger shoulder to waist ratio and you have more ab thickness, you can be a few percent fat higher and still be very attractive.

[26:59] If you don't have much muscle, you have to be a little bit leaner for you not to just look sloppy. And fat distribution shifts this a ton. If you're like me and almost all the fat

[27:12] that you ever gain goes to your gut, then for you to look presentable, you have to be very lean. If your fat mostly goes to your thighs and to your butt and to your arms and not to your midsection, you want the lottery and a 20% body fat

[27:25] you look like you're in great shape and you want that. It's a real thing. Now, it's very likely that dropping

[27:37] into the stage lean death face zone just tends to reduce your average appeal because it can be red as fiery, harsh, obsessive and frankly irritable, which you're probably irritable because you're so pissed you don't get the cheetos all the time.

[27:49] It's just not paying the dividends unless you're hooking up with girls that love shredded men. And the girls that like competitors typically like them off-season better than they like them pre-contest anyway. It's also likely that above the high teens

[28:02] average ratings tend to drift down unless you're very muscular or unless a woman specifically prefers a soft build. And his thing is a lot of women like a hashtag dad bod.

[28:14] And that's totally cool. Like Scott, you and I, we don't really have much opinion on the male body, I guess. But when a girl is like a little sloppy, a little out of shape for daddy, that could be hot, huh?

[28:26] We don't need, you don't bitch, you don't need to be some kind of sculpture for your boy, you heard me. Yeah, that's true. I'm saying just show up with a little pizzazz here. You're overqualified. Matter of fact, if you're female at all, you're overqualified with me, right?

[28:42] If you want a single actionable rule, get lean enough for facial definition, have a little lean face, have a visible waist taper, smaller waist, bigger shoulders.

[28:55] As soon as you get that, you're fit enough. Continue to do whatever you like in fitness, but if you want to attract more females and males, I suppose, spend the rest of your effort

[29:07] on adding muscle, potentially, though that's optional. Improving your style, improving your social ease, and so on and so forth. Stuff that doesn't have to do with bodies and faces, improve your grooming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[29:21] The being super lean is mostly for other men on Instagram or very fitness industry, lean-ness-preferring females. That's a very small fraction of females.

[29:35] And so just remember our golden number from this is 13 to 14% body fat is when most people of college age, female,

[29:47] consider the most attractive. So if you're over that body fat percent, well, you want to be more attractive, you got to get leaner, that's awesome. If you're under that body fat percent as a male, then like you don't need to be any leaner

[30:00] at the very least, in most cases, to attract females, facial fat matter. Some people need to get leaner to get that down. Some people can be heavier, but really, it's around that 12 to 15% mark where most people are having their best time.

[30:13] If you want to have a really, really good time, get you to downloading the RPI Perger Fee app and the RP Diet Coach app and give a look to my book. It's gonna be coming out and it's a whole lot of fun.

[30:25] Tons of pictures of me make it just kidding. The editor said that was weird and they wouldn't answer my emails after that. See you guys next time.