Show HN: Which animal shares your body fat percentage?

[Atallapr]

I recently came across a youtube video about animals and their average body fat percentages.I thought it would be fun to compare my body fat to different animals and see which one I most resemble. This idea spiraled into a two-hour project, where I turned the data from the video into a JSON file, asked chatgpt to help create a UI, and deployed the whole thing on netlify. Pretty cool how fast we can quickly build random projects like this 10x faster with llms!

Now that I’m typing this, I still have no clue why I made this... but here it is. Enjoy!

[jaysonelliot]

It's very fun! The only change I'd make would be to use real photos of the animals instead of the AI images. It's hard to relate to them the way actual pictures would be.

Pexels is an excellent source of free, creative commons images and they have all the animals you need. Here's some geckos https://www.pexels.com/search/gecko/ :)

[ramchip]

I had the same thought. AI art looks cheap, but more importantly it doesn't show if the real animal looks fat or not! Pexels looks super useful.

[pimlottc]

Yeah, fun idea, but the AI-generated animal caricature images are a real turn-off for me.

[davio]

Can also prompt AI to create photorealistic images. Midjourney will probably let you specify famous photographer styles.

[n4r9]

What was the source video for the data BTW? I'm a little unsure about some of these, like cows having 5% body fat! According to this[0] webpage a "moderate" condition cow has 19% body fat, but it has a "Body Composition Score" of 5.

[0] https://www.grass-fed-solutions.com/body-condition-scoring.h...

[tacticalturtle]

Additionally seals have 40% body fat, but walruses have 20%?

That seems suspicious.

[ericmcer]

cows = 5%, wasps = 15%, kangaroos = 2%

I am not an animal expert but just based on intuition this seems off...

[cmiller1]

Note that body fat percentage is notoriously difficult to accurately measure. The linked calculator uses the navy circumference method which gives readings ±3-4 points for most people and even further off for some. It gives me 3.5% which would be insanely low (I'm probably somewhere around 8-10 right now) because I have an unusually wide neck. To get more accurate readings you'd have to pay for a DEXA scan or a bodpod but even those can be off by a couple points.

[s_dev]

My favourite comment on this is the following joke exchange:

Doctor: Your BMI is high I'd like you make some dietary adjustments.

Patient: BMI doesn't measure fat accurately for example professional Rugby players are marked as obese but aren't.

Doctor: Are you a Rugby player?

Patrient: No.

It's a good guideline. Don't let edge cases control your perception and let professionals do their thing with the tools they have -- they're aware of limitations that's why their professionals.

[guerrilla]

> DEXA

Fat calipers would be less accurate than DEXA but much more accurate than Navy circumference method, yet a lot cheaper than DEXA.

[anon84873628]

Yeah, 3.5% would make you leaner than many Mr. Olympia competitors! And nearly at the point of negative health effects.

It's a shame when people use those electronic home scales and believe the results. Someone was so happy to tell me they were at 10% body fat, I could only smile and nod...

Most healthy people would have difficulty dropping below 10-12% without very deliberate effort. And beyond that would probably be kinda freaked out when they start to see all the veins and striations appearing.

[wrs]

Also, when using the Navy method, be sure you read the instructions for how to measure. The “waist” measurement is unfortunately not the number on your trouser size. :)

[nonameiguess]

I can understand the excitement in principle that you made an app with little effort, but there is no reason this can't be a static page with a table of animals and their average body fat percentages. Users don't need to enter any information and you don't even need a backend. They can simply go the page and find the animal from the table that most closely matches their own bodyfat percentage.

The data is also dubious. I'm not going to enter every possible number to see what comes back, but the number reported here for cows is definitely wrong. Insects have cells that can store nutrients, but not adipose tissue in the familiar mammal sense that we have. There is no way to know how much fat they're actually storing at any given moment versus other nutrients.

[timeon]

Users could still enter the information. But instead of input form it would be browsers 'find in page' search bar.

[christiangenco]

This is neat!

I have a few thoughts:

- my intuitive sense of animals that are thin or fat is totally off. I think of cows as being fat (ex: "fat cow") but their body fat percentage is only 6%! I think of Gorillas being super fit and muscular but they're at 31%!

- I hate that I can't hit enter after changing the body fat percentage value and have it change

- on that note I'd prefer if there wasn't a "find my match" button at all—after changing the body fat percentage value the match should immediately update

- better than that would be a sliding scale of every animal and the one that matches gets highlighted and centered

- real-world pictures would be better and even better than that would be an image of the animal and a cross section/MRI of the animal where you can see the fat distribution

[kelipso]

Cow is not 6% body fat unless it's been starving or decided to join a body building contest. The source data is bad, probably got the data from ChatGPT.

[carlgreene]

I am not 10% BF, but was very surprised to see the African Elephant come up for that!

[anon84873628]

I'm skeptical of the source data.

[ProjectArcturis]

Source data is very wrong. A walrus is not 20% body fat.

[fkyoureadthedoc]

All of it? How fat is a walrus, where's _your_ source? It probably varies by subspecies, age, season, etc. Maybe they are ripped af under all that blubber?

OP's source is a YouTube video that doesn't list their source. Given that video is post ChatGPT...

[6510]

It needs to push state the bmi to the url so that I can send it to people.

It could also be fun if one could fill out the age, weight, height and gender to calculate the bmi.

Now that I think about it it would be hilarious to use sliders and have a cartoon person populated with the data generated in real time.

[erikerikson]

This reminds me of the information stealing spam we'd see on Facebook. At least, unlike many of the questions in those, I haven't seen BMI used as a security question.

[nzealand]

The average body fat of a New Zealand male is 14–25% according to Google's AI.

The average body fat of a Kiwi woman is 25-31% according to ChatGPT.

The closest match is the sheep.

[rayxi271828]

Men and women will have very different body fat percentage level for similar look. In general it's something like women's = men's +8-9%?

[willcipriano]

A man is considered lean around 15%, a woman is lean around 20%.

Men: https://images.app.goo.gl/Gn5pBBN2FB22YGsz7

Women: https://images.app.goo.gl/wAP5VDfCzKiWWYwG9

[Atallapr]

I am seeing a lot of cool feature ideas on this thread which is amazing! I just made the repo public if anyone wants to look at the json or put in a PR with some edits :) https://github.com/amittallapragada/animal-bodyfat-calculato...

[abraxas]

"Your closest match is a lion".... alright, I'll continue drinking coffee and staring at the screen all day then.

[zamadatix]

I think it'd be cool if the input was to calculate the % (if you didn't already know) and the area below was just a timeline-like output with the different animals marked along the way. It seems most people here are more interested in exploring the output space than finding their specific animal match.

[bogtog]

I clicked through all the ones from 1% (crab) to 25% (sheep). I honestly can't see any pattern here

[grumpwagon]

Between this today and one square minesweeper yesterday, we're batting 1.000 on funny dumb projects that make me laugh. I don't know why you made this either, but I'm glad you did, thanks!

[fakedang]

Here's another that I discovered today: not a hobby project but a personal webpage that got me rotfl. https://cookie.engineer/

[BigFnTelly]

What's the source on the images? are they AI-generated?

[Aphataeros]

I was wondering the same thing, and checking the images they are hosted on https://craiyon.com/

Craiyon - Create AI Art with our free AI image generator.

[amelius]

There's a crayon in the bottom right corner of each of the images. Perhaps someone recognizes it?

[Gasp0de]

They look AI generated to me.

[topherjaynes]

Whoa, I was shocked that an elephant was sub 10% body fat...now to call some one an elephant and explain it's a compliment!

[spuz]

I consider myself slim but so I was pretty amused to see my spirit animal is the pig. Great idea.

[Gasp0de]

I was completely confused to see that a Walrus has only 2% points more body fat than a Gecko.

[wormlord]

Geckos store fat in their tails

https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.UYKInXyy0_Vhs1qqTziRGwAAAA?rs=...

[parpfish]

id rather see a table than have to enter a form. that way you don't just get "your" score, but you get to see the whole list of animals and learn about which ones have high/low body fat

[sebmellen]

The cutworm moth is 72% body fat. Crazy!!!!

[moralestapia]

Cat master race reporting in.

Great site, thanks for sharing!

[IncreasePosts]

How long did it take you to make?

[Atallapr]

2 hours!

[jamil7]

Err hornet.

[p4bl0]

Héhéhé. That is fun!

[BlindEyeHalo]

Having insects in there feels a bit odd to me. Not exactly relatable.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

This is fun! Take my internet points!

Good job.

[lapcat]

I always suspect that viral online forms like this are simply fronts for collecting personal information to sell.

[umanwizard]

Who would want to buy the results of a highly unscientific poll about body fat percentages?

[jy14898]

Now they know I'm 100% body fat

[im3w1l]

The design encourages trying multiple values, and most people visiting the site probably don't even know their bf%