We all know how maintaining a healthy weight can not only reduce our risks of serious diseases like heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, diabetes, and even cancer in some cases. Maintaining a healthy weight is neither rocket science nor a miracle. It is a state achieved by following a proper lifestyle, including daily exercise, proper diet, and avoiding junk food.

Take it as an alarm signifying the vulnerability of your health towards diseases like diabetes, cancer, arthritis, gallstone, cataracts, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, infertility, snoring, etc.

If you do not weigh more than 10 pounds over what you weighed before 21 years of age, then it indicates that you are in a healthy range. By maintaining a healthy weight, you can have numerous benefits like:

• Better efficiency and stamina to perform any physical activities you desire
• Lesser joint and muscle pains
• Reduces load on the heart and circulatory systems
• Better regulation of blood pressure and bodily fluids
• Improves sleep pattern
• Reduces blood glucose, blood triglycerides, and risk of developing type 2 diabetes
• Reduces risks of heart disease and specific cancers

To maintain a healthy weight, it is crucial to know how much you weigh and what your weight indicates. One of the easiest ways to know this is by calculating your Body Mass Index (BMI) that indicates body fatness. Based on BMI’s percentile, the health status is categorized as underweight, healthy weight, overweight, and obese.

Other than BMI, there is another way to know your health status, calculating your waist circumference. According to many health researchers, BMI is an efficient way to know the healthy weight status in adults, which indicates the life span not just for individuals but also for a group of people. Let’s study more about healthy weight status via BMI.

What is BMI?

BMI or Body Mass Index is a means of assessing an individual’s weights in range with his/her height. BMI calculations are usually preferred by health professionals to know a large group of people’s health status rather than an individual. BMI calculations indicate various things about the person like poor diet, high stress, and varying activity levels.

Just because a person shows a healthy BMI doesn’t mean he is completely fit or because a person shows a high BMI doesn’t mean he/she is not healthy. BMI doesn’t consider body composition like muscle fat, fat, bone density, etc. For instance, an athlete is most likely to show a high BMI that is categorised under overweight or obese. However, he/she can be healthy as the muscle weight is not included in BMI.

How to calculate BMI?

BMI indicates the value of weight in a person’s body in relation to his/her height, and the formula to calculate BMI is weight (kg) / [height (m)]2. Based on this calculation, the weight is categorized under different health conditions such as:

What does your BMIhealth range indicate?

Here are a few risks based on weight range:

What are the risks for obese weight people?

• stroke
• type 2 diabetes
• heart disease
• fatty liver disease
• specific cancers
• fertility issues in women
• high blood pressure
• osteoarthritis
• kidney disease

Health problems associated with a BMI in the underweight range are:

• weak immune system
• fertility in women
• palpitations
• osteoporosis
• anaemia

BMI is efficient in knowing the weight status in adults but not for special cases like pregnant women, athletes, children, etc. It doesn’t take into account factors like gender, bone density, and muscle weight.

Edward Bertrand