Of all First World problems, none seems to take so much time and energy as fussing about weight. Medical science, for instance, has done so many studies on BMI that it is having to do studies of those studies--and even those draw different conclusions. Pretty much all studies confirm that people who are extremely underweight (< 16 BMI) or extremely overweight (> 35 BMI) have greatly increased death rates, but the results for people in the overweight range (25 to 30 BMI) vary from small risk to increased benefit--the trend being towards the latter. A study in 2010 of 19 other studies found that, for white adult males at least, being mildly overweight was best. An even more recent study in 2012, of 97 unique studies, concluded that overweight and grade 1 obesity classifications were optimal for all-cause mortality (and was widely covered in the media).
For your own morbid fun, you can see where yourself and others might have fared in the 2010 study here:
Please note these results are normalized across a large number of variables such as age, health, and lifestyle, so they should be taken with a "grain of salt". For instance, the same study found that moderate alcohol consumption was associated with decreasing death rates for increasing BMI (for non-smokers). Stated differently, overweight drinkers that don't smoke tend to live longer.
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