Click here to find a medical centre near you. To find out your Body Mass Index, visit our local medical centre. It’s also not appropriate in determining a healthy weight in the elderly, children, pregnant women or even athletes. While it may be a great guide to establishing the amount of body fat you carry, your BMI won’t take into consideration your age, sex, ethnicity, or even muscle mass. It’s a good measure of your health, but not perfect Epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national obesity rates. BMI is an inexpensive and easy-to-perform method of screening to identify possible weight problems for adults. Or click here to learn more and calculate your BMI. Body mass index (BMI) is a measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to most adult men and women. Simply divide your weight in kilograms by your height in metres squared.įor example, if you weigh 70kg and you are 185cm tall your BMI calculation will look like this: In fact, knowing your BMI can help you – and your GP – determine any health risks you may face if it’s outside of the healthy range.īeing overweight can lead to a range of chronic conditions including:īeing underweight can result in other health issues like:
It’s a good way to gauge whether your weight is in healthy proportion to your height. Association between WC and health risks is not an easy task and should be done scientifically using proper techniques.Your BMI is a measurement that is a ratio of your weight and height. Other measures, such as waist circumference (WC), can complement BMI estimates. For this reason it is expected that it overestimates adiposity in some cases and underestimates it in others.
Like any other measure it is not perfect because it is only dependant on height and weight and it does not take into consideration different levels of adiposity based on age, physical activity levels and sex. This calculator can help you determine your BMI, although it is not specifically for women: Does the same chart suit all women While a chart can be helpful, BMI is not a one-size-fits-all concept. During the 1970s and based especially on the data and report from the Seven Countries study, researchers noticed that BMI appeared to be a good proxy for adiposity and overweight related problems. It was developed by Adolphe Quetelet during the 19 th century. For those aged 5–19 years, overweight is defined as a BMI-for-age value over +1 SD and obesity as a BMI-for-age value over +2 SD.īMI is very easy to measure and calculate and is therefore the most commonly used tool to correlate risk of health problems with the weight at population level.
The cut-off points of the 2006 BMI-for-age reference for children aged 0–5 years for the diagnosis of overweight and obesity were set as the 97th and the 99th percentile, respectively. During childhood and adolescence the ratio between weight and height varies with sex and age, so the cut-off values that determine the nutritional status of those aged 0–19 years are gender- and age-specific. In children, BMI is calculated as for adults and then compared with z-scores or percentiles. Some common conditions related to overweight and obesity include: premature death, cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis, some cancers and diabetes.īMI is also recommended for use in children and adolescents. BMI was developed as a risk indicator of disease as BMI increases, so does the risk for some diseases. The BMI ranges are based on the effect excessive body fat has on disease and death and are reasonably well related to adiposity. For example, an adult who weighs 70 kg and whose height is 1.75 m will have a BMI of 22.9.įor adults over 20 years old, BMI falls into one of the following categories. It is defined as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of the person’s height in metres (kg/m2). BMI, formerly called the Quetelet index, is a measure for indicating nutritional status in adults.