BMI is not supposed to be used as an indicator of anything other than the relative statistical likelihood that you’ll have health problems related to your body weight. It is a very rough estimate of how much fat someone carries. It is next to useless for anyone outside the “average.” Fit individuals are often way out of bounds for the scale.
My BMI is currently between 25 and 26 even though my body fat is in the teens, because I’ve got a bit more muscle than the norm. If I got my body fat down to 10 percent or so (my goal over the next few months) I would still be at the high end of “normal” even though my height is almost right in the middle of the bell curve, and I’d bet that most of my other physical measurements are pretty close to average too.
Don’t worry if you don’t conform to the BMI standards. It really has nothing to do with you as an individual. It’s a statistical tool thought up in the 1800s that is not even all that good for comparing populations. It’s better than nothing but it’s only used because height and weight are rountinely recorded while actual body fat measures are not. Pay more attention to direct, non-statistical measurements like a skin fold test.
Impedance scales are iffy. My measurement hasn’t changed on the scale I have, even though I’ve gone from 89 to 78 kg since I bought it. The weight part works fine, but the body fat indication has fluctuated between 24 and 26 percent the whole time. If my body fat has only changed 1-2 percent when I’ve lost 11 kg overall, including several centimeters in the waist, and gained a lot of muscle compared to before, there’s definitely something wrong with that measurement. Basically, my body fat scale is worthless for measuring body fat.
Impedence scales aren’t very accurate. Mostly, I think they just do a quick BMI calculation and guess your fat percentage based on an average body type.
The fat meters I’ve used at the gyms have hand and foot sensors and take about a minute to do a full reading. I don’t know how accurate they are, but they certainly produce a lot of data.
Well if we’re talking about “healthy” rather than ideal, it may be better to be somewhat overweight than not, according to a recent article in Scientific American:
Of course there are causation/correlation issues to contend with (are overweight people more likely to be healthy than people that way less to begin with?), but it’s food for thought.
See, it doesn’t work well at the extremes of height. Very tall and very short people will find BMI less accurate. Also people with more muscle will find it puts them too high.
I’m down at the bottom heightwise and I’m supposed to weigh between 102 and 128lbs, whereas I normally weigh less than 98lbs, giving me a maximum BMI of 19.
At 100lbs I feel fat and don’t look my best, I can’t imagine what I’d look like at 128lbs.
The problem is that people use it as a “real measurement”, not as an “indicator”
At 5’4" I’ve always thought my best weight was 145 lbs… which puts me into the “overweight” category according to the BMI. But I am of genuinely stocky build (I like to say I’m the reason they call women “broads”), I do carry a little more muscle than average, and other folks call me thin. I wouldn’t want to get up to a BMI of 30 or {{{shudder}}} 40 - which I think may be a point here. You can quibble about whether or not a 26 or 27 is healthy or not, but if you’re a 40 you DO have a problem. Folks get too fixated on a particular number(s).
I’ve always been frustrated by those charts. I weigh about 140 now and am 5’1" – this puts me in the overweight catagory on both the height-weight and BMI charts. Yet I wear a size 8 or 10 in clothes, smaller than the national average. Now, I’ve gained 10 pounds this year (since my son left home) that I would very much like to get off. 130 is a good weight for me at this age (I was 120-125 in my 20s), and one I can maintain easily. At 130, I wear a size 6 or 8. And yet that puts me in the very top end on normal on both the charts.
Those charts are ridiculous. I’m 6’4" and when I weighed 185 everybody told me I looked too skinny. At 220, I felt good, looked good, and was in decent physical shape. I would feel quite good about myself it I was 220 again.
According to your BMI link, 205 is overweight at 6’4", and Weight Watchers considers it the maximum weight at my age! The BMI link shows 155 at the low end of normal. I weighed 165 when I first reached this height, and I had no muscle and bones were sticking out all over. If I wasn’t in a teenaged growth spurt, it would definitely have been unhealthy.
Just remember…Karl Malone, in his prime, is considered ‘obese’ by BMI standards…and he was perhaps the most in-shape man in the NBA.
I have a lot of muscle mass, very broad shoulders, and I’m ‘obese’ by BMI standards. Now, I could stand to lose a few pounds (If I lost 20 lbs, I’d be quite trim), but as it is, I’m in pretty good shape. I run about 12 miles a week and am pretty darn strong. There are people the same height, 20lbs lighter than me with 3x the amount of fat I have. In order for me to make the high end of normal for my height, I would literally have to lose muscle, because I would have to drop to around 3% body fat to make it to my ‘normal’ weight. Sorry…for most people, 3% body fat is quite unhealthy.
“…Lakers superstar Shaquille O’Neal is officially “obese.” In fact, by the federal government’s standard, 75 percent of the players in the NBA Finals are classified as either overweight or obese…”