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I couldn’t find stat for all of North America, but 70% of American adults are overweight, so most North American woman being overweight wouldn’t be that surprising.

Some of this is that BMI can be misleading. It’s based on your weight divided by your height squared. From a medical statistics standpoint, it’s better than nothing, but since it doesn’t make a distinction between muscle weight and fat weight, it can put a lot of very muscular people in the overweight column.

The category of "overweight" has nothing to do with being average, or clothing sizes. It is only regarding the amount of fat in the body. Fat distributed to places, is still fat. If those people lost weight, they would lose fat. It's not a question of making people feel ok about their fat. Fat is still harmful regardless of how well it's carried or placed in the body.

"Overweight" in this context doesn't have much to do with clothing sizes. It's a quasi-medical definition that is based on the BMI (a ratio of height to weight). Various medical organizations eventually landed on the idea that a BMI of 25-30 is "overweight," but this was a pretty arbitrary definition and doesn't mean much. Research on the links between BMI and health outcomes have not produced evidence that BMIs in the "overweight" range are associated with poor health, and there's some evidence that they can protect people from diseases that sap your energy. On top of this, BMI does not distinguish between men and women, despite the fact that women are naturally heavier for a given height.

The question of what should be considered "medium" or "normal" in clothing sizes is pretty separate. Different brands have completely different sizing schemes, and many are intentionally set up to flatter their buyers or for some other purpose than clearly communicating the dimensions of the clothing.

The BMI definition of "overweight" is pretty tight compared to general American sensibilities. It leaves a lot of room for being cosmetically overweight rather than being a significant health issue and yeah, unusually fit or broadly built people will often be caught in that category as well. It's also just the nature of weight that it's much easier to be over and to be a significant outlier far, FAR over than under. The distribution is right skewed.

That said, North Americans are absolutely majority overweight and have been so long enough that we have a warped perception of weight compared to many places where this is not a decades old issue.

> Soo…. The majority of women are overweight?

Yes. A smaller percentage, around 40%, are obese according to BMI.

People labelled as obese and underweight according to BMI tend to be at much higher risk for various health problems. The evidence is less concrete for the overweight, but not obese group. The reason is basically exactly what you're getting at. You can be overweight by being particularly muscular, etc.

BMI is an incredibly rough measure of your physical condition. At the extremes (obese and underweight) it is definitely associated with health problems. At more middling levels the fuzziness and imprecision of the measurement makes it less useful as a gauge for health risks.