BMI : What Your Body Mass Index Actually Tells You (And What It Doesn’t)

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What is BMI?

Body mass index is a tool used by professionals to define the fat accumulation over the body of person with relative to their height. This tool helps to categorize the individual to underweight, obese or normal weight.

BMI can be used by anyone to understand weather they are overweight or not. There is formula that helps to find out the BMI.

BMI = Weight of person in kg / Height² (m²)

Lets take an example to calculate BMI of 37 year old person whose weight is 70 kg and height is 1.75 meter.

BMI = 70/(1.75*1.75)

BMI = 22.9 Kg/m²

So, weather it is normal category or not.

BMI results are often accumulated or understand as below.

BMI (kg/m²) Health Status
Less than 18.5 Underweight
18.5–24.9 Normal weight
25.0–29.9 Overweight
30.0–34.9 Obesity Class I
35.0–39.9 Obesity Class II
40.0 or higher Obesity Class III (Severe obesity)

So, as per the above criteria, the BMI of the above example is normal.

Why we need to keep our BMI at normal range?

Maintaining BMI is very important for following purposes,

  1. It put the person free from either of obesity and also malnourishment
  2. It decreases the chances of heart diseases specially in high bmi categories
  3. Normal bmi means a person is healthy and physically fit
  4. Healthy BMI helps to avoid many non communicable diseases

Why BMI is widely uses as tool to measure body fat?

  1. It is very quick method. Any health professionals can understand the health status of person within minutes by looking at their height and weight. It serve as a medium for initial guidance regarding nutrition and their health.
  2. It is useful in assessing the BMI of huge population
  3. BMI helps to monitor the body mass and further helps to monitor the diet and prevent diseases.
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What are the limitations of the BMI?

  1. Sometimes BMI fails to identify the difference between the muscles and fat. It treat weight of the person same for muscle weight and fat weight.
  2. BMI does not understand the demographic characteristics of the person. Some people have naturally higher fat accumulation than other. So, BMI wont calculate or assume that.

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