Aug 15 Are You Overweight?
More body fat measures
BMI is a Pretty Good Way to tell whether a person is overweight, but it’s an approximate measure that doesn’t take into account how muscular you are. Because muscle tissue weighs more than fat, trim and muscular people might weigh enough to put them into the overweight or even obese category. If you are reading this article, we probably aren’t talking about you, but I just thought I’d mention it. Conversely, people with very small frames and light bones might fall into the normal range even if they have too much stored fat around the waist and hips.
There are some fairly high-tech and expensive ways to measure the proportion of fat in a person’s body’
One technique that theoretically can make a distinction between muscle and fat involves being weighed underwater. In another method that “knows” the difference between fat and lean, a harmless electric current is passed through the body. Finally, the skinfold test uses calipers to measure how much fat there is under the skin. It’s really just a more professional version of the old “can you pinch an inch?” test.
Height-weight table
Before BMI, people gauged their weight according to a height-weight table that was put out by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The table gave a normal weight range for different heights and frame sizes. There were a number of problems with the table, the biggest being that it was based on insurance company statistics about average weight, rather than on medical evidence about what is healthy and what is not. This measure of normal weight is no longer considered reliable, but it may be useful as a supplement to BMI, as we shall see.
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