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. 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 1/2% body fat, I'll be the optimally attractive, you're leaving 90% of attraction on the table still. 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 are reviewing a study today. The study is called the relationship between body fatness and physical attractiveness in males by Fan Jia and colleagues. Let's dive super deep to see what's going on here 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? Um, I like love your donut. Can I like eat your donut? You're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, is donut a euphemism for some part of my body or you literally mean my donut?" Let's find out. All right, so first, what was the basic research question that the study was asking? 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? Cuz leaner is better is 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 uh or is the shoulder to waist ratio a bigger predictor of attractiveness? So, is it somebody do do women or other men like men to be leaner? Or is it really like as long as they're not too big cuz a 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. Another question is like do does the best looking BMI line up with what from evolution we would predict as like the healthiest most robust BMI cuz like low 20s all the way to mid to high 20s in BMI seem to be what evolution would predict as 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 the study tested folks in China or as I like to pronounce it China. Scott, how was that? Pretty good? >> Pretty good. Now, tell you what, brother. Now, I thought we won World War II. Lithuania and the United Kingdom. That's right, it's not the United Kingdom, it's the the United Kingdom. There's 18 letters missing there. So, we have three different countries and are there going to be any differences in ratings between those countries or is this like if all three countries are basically the same, we can start to suspect that like oh, there's like a pretty good deal of cultural universality to this, which means maybe it's more biological 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. So, maybe there's differences between them, maybe not. Now, how did they do this? What was the study design? They had 283 university recruited participants from Beijing, a place in Lithuania that looks like Panevėžys or some shit like that. Lithuanian language is practically like incomprehensible and Aberdeen and so China, Lithuania, United Kingdom and they had both male and female raters 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 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 it published elsewhere. We sure did. Next up, the stimulus, right? The testing protocol was every rater, male and female, received 15 black and white Dexa body 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 Dexa images where you can see shape. You can see body fat uh like on the periphery and that's about it. These men who were in these 15 pictures 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 at the lowest of about 20 and the highest of about 34. Big broad range which is great because they can really tell some differences. And the core predictors here, the independent variables are going to be body fat percent, body mass index, 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. 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. 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. The experimenters told the subjects to say, "Okay, you have 15 cards, right?" Cuz each card is a picture of uh a male with certain body fat percent, certain DEXA scan. "I want you to sort all of them in a way 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, a sorting game to do. 15 is just not that many to sort and you just pretty quickly find out where light goes to one end of the pile, where it goes to the other, then you do a couple comparisons, you're like, this, this, that, and it's good to go. It's not perfect, we'll talk about the limitations of this 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. 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. Do males and females appraise male physiques differently? And countries of the world, do Chinese people, Lithuanians, or the people of who have the greatness of Britain among them, are they going to be saying somebody fats and some muscularities are different than others? 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 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 won. 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. 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, 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 peak in relationships, with 23 to 27 BMI being the best scoring across all of the different sizes of bodies. The shoulder-to-waist ratio showed a a rough uh peak of about 1.57. So, shoulders being 1.57 times as wide as the waist, that's distinctly wider shoulders than 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 a kind of a a little bit of a maximum there 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 adiposity, the amount of fat you have, 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, 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 cuz it's much easier to change how lean you are than to change how wide your shoulders are and how narrow your waist is. Those are related, but not entirely related. Here's some country nuance. In China and Lithuania, the shoulder to waist ratio 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 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. 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. 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 it. 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. Nah, I I think we're like biased with our like fitness lens, but you know, in the real world, if you see someone 13% body fat and you don't train, you're like, "That dude's shredded." >> Yeah, that guy's in good shape. That's true. Yeah, if you don't train, there's a lot of work there. All right. So, what did the authors think all of this meant? Couple of points. People seem to prefer moderate male fatness, not extremes of fatness or leanness. The fatness extremes we saw coming. The leanness extremes is bit of an interesting thing. At least in this strip-down kind of bodies-only setup, this is what people prefer. Adiposity, otherwise known as fatness, appears to be a more reliable cue for attractiveness than shoulder-to-waist ratios. Uh that means that pushing, especially combined with the fact that extreme shoulder-to-waist ratios showed no benefit, if you have a choice between being a little bit leaner versus being a huge massive shouldered super tiny waisted freak, the being a bit leaner is a good thing. Now, I'm saying a bit leaner, but I really shouldn't be saying it like that. Being close to about 13 to 14% body fat pays more dividends than a massive shoulder-to-waist ratio. The other thing is this, it turns out the best body mass index, the degree of overall body size, did match evolutionary predictions, which is really cool. So, it looks like humans choose what is most attractive to them highly based on an very 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. You're not like, "Oh, let me see her shoulder-to-waist ratio." You 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. As a matter of fact, Scott, can I pimp the book? Pick it up. Ta-da! Uh it's uh going on sale mid-June, and uh we'll throw a pre-sale link into the bottom of this video so you know when it comes out. But, uh 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 jacked to be your best looking self. Two is what kind of cool amazing technologies 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, you know, should people focus on like their external appearance, or is that toxic and bad? I get into all that stuff. 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 when folks say, "Well, you just have to change your perspective." Like, yeah, but it's not my perspective. It's like somewhere deep in my brain. It's built in. Just the same we hear people picked who they thought was attractive and it really lined up with evolution, which is I suppose not surprising, but really really cool news. 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 and who is the most lean cues, which is kind of an interesting thing for us in fitness to hear because we get a little carried away with extreme sometimes. They also did uh in the discussion section 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. And that remains an open question as exactly what that means with the evolutionary psychology. They also did something really cool which we'll talk about a little bit when we discuss this just shortly uh is that they acknowledge that real-life attractiveness 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. There's nobody saying that like body fat percentage 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 this study did well? What are the strengths? There's a bunch. The objective body composition is amazing. DEXA link data avoids entirely the well, everyone guesses body fat wrong problem because we know exactly what their body fats are. They're not asked to guess about body fat and just attraction. We already know the body fat. Amazing that they did cross-cultural sampling. We had China, we have Lithuania, which is Eastern Europe, and UK, which is Western Europe. So, like, we got Asia, but a big part of Asia. We got Western Europe, Eastern Europe. That's a lot of diversity, and plus 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 from all the countries, it looked like, "Oh, huh, interesting. Man, really a lot of people all around the world, both male and female, by the way, kind of prefer a really well-under- stood thing. They did a great job of separating the variables. They had three shoulder-to- waist ratios, three adiposity, 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 and we learn nothing from that. They did great job at reducing confounds. They blurred the faces, cuz otherwise, the cute people would just be getting better ratings, and then people would say that's body fat-related. Uh, they removed the height, which is really important. Removing height's a big deal, cuz height's a big deal in attraction. And, uh, 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. Um, they had both male and female raters. That's huge. Like, 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 and allows us to really examine like what are males looking for versus what are females looking for. Wonderful, wonderful that they did this. They also had a hypothesis ahead of time. They They put their money where their mouth is, and they said, "Hey, evolution predicts that a mid-range BMI is going to be the thing, and and we're going to 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 really they had a hypothesis, which was really neat to see. And the outcome, the testing variable was super simple, super intuitive. Sort by attractiveness is really easy for participants to figure out. It's super easy to, uh, interpret. It has some drawbacks, but like it's really, really robust. Um so this is all really great stuff. 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 at once. First, there were This is something you might have thought of yourself already. There were 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. There's like 150 at least to paint a really good perspective. You can't do a sorting task with 150, that would take 10 hours. 15 is limited. Um any one guy's proportions in there can sway the set. Bone structure, muscle distribution, fat distribution, even at the same percentage could could heavily sway the curve at at least enough to give us not as precise of a measurement as we wanted. Um another thing is like um external 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 DEXA scan in your face. And so it's great for isolating shape, but it's ecologically a little bit weird. Um only fat on the sides can be seen in a DEXA, at least visually. Uh not fat on the abs or chest or anything like that. And those are very big missing pieces because ab fat and especially male facial fat are huge cues for women. But they're not included here. Women like some jawline. They like some cheek bones. 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 cheek bone ab 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 and he's already got well ahead on the chiseled face situation. So, for those guys, their optimal body fat percent for attraction, man, that's very different cuz imagine you're the guy that's 19% fat and you have a pretty chiseled face already. If you get down to 9% fat, women think you're fucking 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." 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. Uh they're not representative of the full country's mating market. These also were not fitness people, which is huge to remember. If you want to be taking muscle mommies home from the gym, man, you got to think it through 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 hoes, as they're known colloquially, you know, no disrespect, is not a good idea to begin with, but if you're really into a certain thing and 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 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 I'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, 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 and no ties. So, some people could have been roughly the same, but they were forced to rank them, which means the differences between body fats might actually not as be as big as we think. It's 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 it it's it's definitely uh a thing. 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 oh anywhere between 11% and 16% fat is really good. It's going to actually mean like it's not just anywhere between these is really good. It's that anywhere between them really just doesn't matter. Like that would be really insightful versus if they ranked them and they meant the rankings, they would actually you know 11 and 12 are the best, 13 14 not as great, and 15 16 maybe not as great cuz they had to rank them. >> [gasps] >> Here's another thing. Muscularity isn't cleanly separated here. Uh BMI can reflect muscle or fat. The DEXA helps but with only 15 images, 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 jacked they really are. It's some you can tell to some extent cuz 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. Now, this is not this is a weakness of the study in the sense of if the study was trying to sort in in the real world what really matters the most but it wasn't. And so this critique is a little bit not I'll say a little bit of a cheap shot but just it's it's 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 thereof. 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, how are you? 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. 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 and they matter a ton. This study did not try to say that these don't matter, but just in case you're confused and think if I just get to 12 and 1/2% body fat, I'll be the optimally attractive, you're leaving 90% of attraction on the table still. >> [sighs and gasps] >> All right. In the real world, 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 on evolutionary grounds of maximum health and maximum muscle anabolism, which is actually really cool. So, notice your best body fat for bulking in most cases 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 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 at 10 to 15%. It's neat. It would really Scott, wouldn't it suck if like you felt your best at 12% but women loved you the most at 3%? Yeah. [laughter] I mean, some of those in the fitness industry might 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 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, you know, 11 and 1/2 or 12 and 1/2%, 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 a lean athletic preference, which is, you know, if you don't think 13% is lean athletic, you're delusional fitness industry person like me. Cuz first time I hear that, I'm like, "13% is fat." But I've gone insane. They don't prefer shredded people on average. 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. Jawline and cheekbones showing, which may occur fatter or skinnier for you, depending on who you are. Waist clearly smaller than shoulders. No belly overhang, and some ab visibility 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. I'll get to that later, cuz you could be prioritizing a shit ton 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, etc., 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. 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 is probably going to do you much better than getting freaky lean and having weird jawlines, and people run scared from you. It is almost certain >> [clears throat] >> that having more muscle shifts that entire window upward. So, if you are more jacked, if you have a bigger shoulder-to-waist ratio, and you have more ab thickness, uh you can be a few percent fat higher and still be very attractive. 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 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 won the fucking lottery and at 20% body fat, you look like you're in great shape and fuck you on that. >> [laughter] [screaming] >> It's a real thing. Now, it's very likely that dropping into the stage lean death phase zone just tends to reduce your average appeal because it can be read as wiry, harsh, obsessive, and frankly irritable, which you're probably irritable cuz you're so pissed you don't get to eat Cheetos all the time. 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, average ratings tend to drift down unless you're very muscular or unless a woman specifically prefer prefers a soft build. And here's the thing, is a lot of women like a fucking #dadbod 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 fucking hot, huh? 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. You just show up with a little pizzazz. You're You're overqualified. Matter of fact, if you're female at all, you're overqualified with me. What? >> [sighs] >> If you want a single actionable rule, get lean enough for facial definition, a little lean face. Have a visible waist taper, smaller waist, bigger shoulders. 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 on adding muscle, potentially, though that's optional, improving your style, improving your social ease, and so on and so forth, stuff that has to do with bodies and faces. Improve your grooming, etc., etc., etc. The being super lean is mostly for other men on Instagram or very fitness industry lean this preferring females. That's a very small fraction of females. And so, just remember, our golden number from this is, yeah, 13 to 14% body fat is what most people of college age female consider the most attractive. So, if you're over that body fat percent, well, like you want to be more attractive, you got to get leaner. That's us. If you're under that body fat percent as a male, then like you don't need to be any leaner at the very least, in most cases, to attract females. Facial fat matters. 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. If you want to have a really really good time, get you you get you to downloading the RP Hypertrophy app and the RP Diet Coach app and give a look to my book. It's going to be coming out and it's a whole lot of fun. Tons of pictures of me naked. Just kidding. The editor said that was weird and they wouldn't answer my emails after that. See you guys next time.