12.31

How much would I need to weigh to have the same waist measurement as height? I wonder if there's ever been a person who was bigger around than they are tall, and by how much? Is it possible for a person of my height to be as big around as they are tall, or would the skeleton rebel?

Hypothesis: because of the square-cubed law of mass, it is impossible for me to be as big around as I am tall.

I use myself not because I am a good proxy for all humanity (I am in the top 5% of males worldwide even if I can't find a source) but because I am most familiar with my own body. I am 74.5 inches or 189 centimeters tall. There was a time I accidentally claimed to be 200 cm and a German person laughed at me, but I'm not that far off in the grand scheme of things. Also: this puts the lie to all the height charts in manga with svelte Japanese high schoolers being 190 cm. I currently weigh 194 pounds or 89 kg. Essentially, I need to never change weight because 189 cm/89 kg has a nice symmetry. My waist size is 86 cm and my rump is 104 cm. I figure in a perfect world I would balloon out symmetrically and make my math simple.
So: is it possible? Casual Male XL sells pants for people of 190 cm height that are 182 cm circumference. If a retail chain sells pants that are nearly my goal circumference, I think we are in business. Hypothesis shattered. Now to figure out how heavy I would have to be.

Hypothesis: I would be lethally obese, but I could definitely be as big around as tall.

I could get very scientific here. I could go and find lists of people and their relative height to waist size at various weights. I could construct a theoretical model and try to fit a projection to the data. I would want at least twenty examples of people roughly my height (Can I find John Candy's waist size?) to construct this model. This will only lead to bad places.

Walter Hudson
On the list not for his matching height (I don't actually know his height), but for his waist size even if it's probably an outlier. 302 cm at 545 kg. First data point!

Hugh Laurie
Hugh's height is 189 cm. I have no idea his pants size.

Lawrence Fishburne
The most B.A. man with a tooth gap is 183 cm and someone has promoted wild speculation as fact. Where are they getting their figures? Either way, it is reassuring to think that I might be able to share pants with Lawrence Fishburne.

Sidney Poitier
Sidney is 189 cm. I'm not actually finding any useful information at all, but I am enjoying myself immensely. Look at this woman who politely suggests that the director was an idiot for cutting out the raunchy Poitier scenes. Plus, Sidney and I are both Pisces!

Extra information:
Jon Minnoch, the heaviest man alive, lost approximately five times my weight while hospitalized and still weighed twice as much as I do.

I'm done looking at celebrities of roughly the same height as me. I'll never build my statistical model. I think my only resort is to find the density of fat and muscle and check my math using the square-cube law. So. Fat is 0.9 g/mL and muscle is 1.06 g/mL. I don't assume there will be much more muscle in a really heavy person than in a muscular person. This is partially conjecture and partially because I went to Bodyworlds one time and saw that under our skin and fat, we're all pretty much the same size? Besides, they had a thin slice of a fat man and he was normal with a load of adipose just like . . . layered on him? This is a perpendicularly-sliced man in a disturbing video. So all I really have to do is figure out how many ml of fat I would need to expand, like an prolate spheroid, to achieve a distance around my minor axis of equivalence with the distance of 2c from pole to pole on my z-axis.

Thanks, Wikipedia. So, I want to set 2c to 189cm and since a is the equatorial radius of the spheroid, I need (circumference) 2πa = 189 cm. Woaaaah 2c = 2πa, meaning that there's some magical relationship there that I am too mathematically inept to figure out. Guys, we're on a journey. A journey which started with me trying desperately to figure out what x and y are before realizing they're so utterly unimportant as to be laughable. If I'm treating myself as a simple spheroid, which I am, because I'm liking picturing my fat self as a football, the equation for volume doesn't care.

a is approximately 30.08 cm if my equator is 189cm. That would make c = 94.5cm and the whole volume problem easy enough to figure out. Let's plug it in to Wolfram Alpha. 358159 . . . units. What the heck is my units here? Cubic centimeters? I mean, I guess so? And cm^3 is actually just mL, so. Wait: crap! I have to figure out my displacement to subtract my basic human frame from the 358,159 mL estimate of my goal volume. Maybe I can estimate that, too, but we're getting really extreme in our estimations, here. No human is shaped like a prolate spheroid. I estimated I am roughly 88.1 liters in volume, which is extremely disappointing that I break my ~89 theme. Wolfram Alpha says the human average is 66.4 liters, which is 66 kg of water. Obviously, water is the closest estimate for human density? Meaning 88 L of human weighs the same as 88L of water? But I know this to be untrue for me because when I let my breath out, I sink to the bottom of whatever pool I'm in. I've tested to at least depths of 6 m. So. Actual height: 189 cm. Target waist: 189 cm. Estimated actual volume: 88.1 L. Target volume: 358 L.
If all I had to do was gain fat, this is how much I would have to gain.

From Wolfram Alpha

That's pretty intense, but there are loads of people who weigh more than 332 kg. That's only 730 lbs, and that's me as an oblate spheroid. I gain mass much faster than I gain volume, due to the square-cube law of mass.
My BMI would be something like 93. It's not even on a normal chart. Anyway, I'm excited I don't have to buy pants like this anytime soon, but maybe this gave you some small joy to picture me as a football-shaped humanoid.

Thanks.