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Don't feel like your body mass index accurately represents your health? According to a recent article in The New York Times, more and more doctors may be on your side. Even though it's widely used to gauge whether or not a person is overweight, BMI -- which relies mostly on comparing your height to your weight -- may not indicate the whole truth of how you're built and whether or not you need to drop pounds.
The issue? BMI scores can't tell the difference between an overweight man who is 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds and, say, Christian Bale at his most "Batman" buff. And that's just a shame. Plus, people with the same BMI can have very different blood pressures, cholesterol levels and other gauges of physical fitness. So, how do we figure out if a person is actually healthy, beyond just being a thinner or thicker milkshake?
The real truth comes, doctors say, from measuring the percentage of body fat, which can be done a few different ways. One is a complicated DEXA scan, a type of X-ray that shows the amount of lean and fat body mass a person has, with a determination of "overweight" meaning body-fat percentage is over 25 percent for a man and over 35 percent for a woman. A simpler if less effective method is measuring waist-to-hip ratio, which is the circumference of the smallest part of your waist divided by the circumference of the largest part of your hips. (A man's ratio should be no larger than .90, and a woman's ratio should be no larger than .83.) Finally, body-fat percentage can be determined by the always-flattering "skin fold" technique, where calipers are applied to the sexy folds of skin in your thigh, triceps and hips.
Conclusion? Like anything else in life, something as complicated as health should never be reduced to just a number. If you're not working out and only eating a handful of Funyuns a day, you are not healthier than a person who is 20 extra pounds. Keep an eye on your numbers, but do it while working out and eating big green salads.
See how we're getting fit -- and getting pinched with calipers to determine our body-fat ratios -- in our 9-to-Fine program.
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Wednesday 08 September
By tfarnon
Okay. At this point in my life my BMI and my actual body fat content agree: I'm obese. I'm fat. I am. But there were many years where my BMI did not reflect my body fat content. When I was in my 20's, I was extremely athletic. I wore a size 28 waist Levi's 501 Jeans and they fit well (I'm female)--not too tight, not too loose. At the time, I weighed about 155 pounds at 5'7" tall. I had a body fat percentage of 15%. I no longer had periods. I ran, I danced, I lifted weights, I hiked, I cross-country skiied. I was mostly muscle and bone. There was NO WAY I even came CLOSE to "overweight", much less "obese", but the BMI charts say that I was close to "overweight".
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Wednesday 08 September
By tfarnon
There is totally a thing such as big-boned. It's called acromegaly. It's due to an excess of Human Growth Hormone. And even when it doesn't reach acromegaly, there are in fact people with big bones. My ex-husband is one of those people. That man's wrists are HUGE. All of his bones are heavy and large, but it was really obvious when I went to buy him a gold bracelet as a wedding present. They don't make them that big. I had to get a jeweler to make him one.
As for me, I'm large-framed for a woman. I've also become fat/obese as the years went by. But I have large, broad hands, large, broad feet, broad shoulders and a big ribcage. And all of those bones were very dense when I was in my 20's. One idiot doctor was convinced I had a stress fracture in my foot or ankle, so he sent me for a PET scan. I knew it was inflammation of ligaments, tendons and/or other connective tissue, but he insisted he knew best. You should have seen the scan. At the time I had the kind of bone density seen only in men. Those bones and the muscles that built them gave me a body weight and a BMI usually seen only in women wearing pants many sizes larger.
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Wednesday 08 September
By to gabby who said 5 lbs=5lbs
Yes, 5 pounds does equal 5 pounds. But muscle does weigh more than fat. Ever heard of something called density? Density is the little thing that makes a small rock which could fit in the palm of your hand 15 lbs. Ever notice how a 10 lbs. dumbell isn't that much bigger than a 5 lbs? It's because of denisty. The size of something isn't relative to it's weight (at least, not much). Therefore, if my arm was pure muscle, it would weigh more than if it was pure fat, even though the space it takes up is the same.
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Friday 10 September
By Ophelia
T"doc?"T - Actually, there are three or more bone sizes - small, medium and large and everything in between. Sorry, T, but your complete lack of knowledge of anatomy is showing. Here is a quick way to help you understand it.
Measure your wrist. There will be great differences in this measurement. A tiny wrist or a large wrist measurement indicate the size of the bones, indicating small bones, medium bones or large bones. I realize it takes some investigation to fully comprehend this, but I explained it simply and it should be simple to understand. Get it now?
As for five pounds is five pounds, well, take a five pound sack of flour of feathers and a five pound beef roast. The roast beef will be smaller, and take up less room than the five pounds of feathers. Just as five pound of muscle will take up less room per square inch than five pounds of fluffly fat.
Therefore, a person with larger bones and more muscle will look thinner, with their bones being very prominent, than a small bones person with lack of muscle tone and more fat surrounding their small bones, who will look chubby
and fat, but which person will weigh more? The small boned chubby person will weigh less than the muscluar big boned person who looks slim.
The best scales were the Metropolitan life height and weight scales which sorted people into small, medium and large "frames" according to gender
and height. If we bring those scales back, people will have a much more accurate idea of how they rank, in terms of being overweight. A small bones chubby person with lack of muscle tone will realize they are overweight, while a
larger boned, muscular person of the same height, will see that they fit right into the correct weight for their frame. It is time to go back to those more accurate charts, in order to help everyone realize what weight is correct for their own bone structure. This can only make everyone better informed and ultimately, more healthy for life.
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Thursday 04 November
By FTBL 87
Ok, no matter what anyone says the BMI is not accurate for every individual. I am a Division 1 football player that is 6'5" 230 lbs and my body fat is under 7 percent yet on the BMI chart I am overweight. Someone tell me i'm wrong, because i'm not...
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