What is My Ideal Healthy Weight?

BMI (Body Mass Index) has been used for over 100 years in population studies, by doctors, personal trainers, and other health care professionals, when deciding whether their patients are overweight. However, BMI has one important flaw - it does not measure your overall fat or lean tissue (muscle) content.

An Example of Where Body Mass Index (BMI) is Flawed

Imagine you were asked to advise two men on their bodyweight:

The couch potato: He is 1.83 meters tall (6 feet tall), never does any exercise, and weighs 92 kilograms (203 lbs). His BMI is 27

The athlete: He is an Olympic champion 100-meter sprinter, 1.83 meters tall (6 feet tall), does an incredible amount of exercise, and weighs 96 kilograms (211 lbs). His BMI is 28

If you used just the BMI formula, you would tell the athlete that he is fatter than the couch potato - which is obviously completely wrong. This is because BMI does not calculate how much fat or lean tissue (muscle) your body carries.

Clearly, the athlete is not overweight, and the couch potato is. This is because the athlete is much more muscle-bound than the couch potato - muscle weighs more than fat.

So, What is My Ideal Healthy Weight?

We would all love to be told clearly how much we should weigh and how to calculate this ourselves. Unfortunately, your ideal weight is not a black and white formula.

You cannot simply calculate your healthy weight from a general source - it depends on several factors, including your overall 

• general health
• height
• muscle-fat-ratio
• bone density
• body type
• sex
• age

Working out your BMI may give people a rough idea of how much they should weigh, but as you have seen in this article, it really is a flawed formula. BMI is useful when studying large populations, but not for individuals.

BMI + Waist Measurements to Determine Body Weight Status. "Waist measurements" means 1. Waist-to-height ratio, and 2. Waist circumference.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, and the Hospital for Sick Children in in Ontario, reported in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine that BMI together with waist measurements are linked to lipid and blood pressure evaluations among teenagers who are overweight/obese.

"In conclusion, waist measures serve to further specify lipid and blood pressure assessments in overweight and obese adolescents, with the greatest associations noted for obese adolescents. 

Waist measures appear to be important discriminating measurements when assessing lipid and blood pressure measurements in adolescents with high BMI and should be included when screening for cardiometabolic risk in overweight and obese adolescents."