Normal. Underweight. Overweight. Obese.
These are the four terms most of us are familiar with when it comes to describing our own fitness levels. Most of us have grown up hearing one’s weight should be proportional to their height. The measure for that we are all familiar with is Body Mass Index.
BMI has been a very common method for determining whether an individual is obese. The basis of the BMI was devised in the 1800s by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, turned mathematician. It is merely a ratio of a person’s body mass (kg) divided by the square of their height (m2)
If you fall between 18.5-24.9, you are considered normal. Anything below is underweight, anything above, overweight. And above 30 is obese. But if you’re still using BMI as a measure of your health, don’t.
A recent study has shown that BMI is not just outdated, but possibly even a dangerous method to determine one’s health and fitness. According to a report in the Medical News Bulletin, Danish researchers found that, “when they controlled for age and lifestyle factors, fitness and waistline circumference were inversely associated with each other, independent of BMI values.”
The report added that around 30% of ‘obese’ people - as part of the research sample - were actually metabolically healthy.
What does this actually mean? We caught up with a fitness and nutrition expert to break it down.
Watch the full video here: