How to tell if you’re really overweight – and it’s NOT by checking your BMI
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How to tell if you’re really overweight, and it’s NOT by measuring your BMI
- Measuring waist-to-hip ratio may be better for monitoring health than BMI
- Excess abdominal weight may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, studies show
More than half the world will be overweight or obese by 2035, a damning report warned today.
This equates to 4 billion people, according to the World Obesity Federation’s 2023 atlas projections.
He used the BMI for his assessments, a figure calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared. According to the WHO guidelines, a BMI greater than 25 indicates overweight and greater than 30, obesity.
But some experts say the measurement should be scrapped and replaced with waist-to-hip ratio.
The simplistic method does not take into account the distribution of muscle or fat, which means that a rugby player and a sedentary of the same height and weight would receive the same score.
Waist-to-hip ratio is calculated by dividing the circumference of your waist by the circumference of your hips. Women with a ratio of 0.85 or higher and men with a score of 0.9 or higher are considered to have high-risk levels of visceral fat.
It classifies people as underweight (less than 18.5), healthy weight (18.5 to 24.9), overweight (25 to 29.9), or obese (30 or higher).
Looking at the hip-to-waist ratio offers doctors a better way to gauge obesity, advocates say.
It can help determine if someone has excess weight around the stomach.
This ratio is calculated by dividing your waist measurement by your hip measurement.
The value of the score is different in men and women.
In women, if you end up with a number of 0.8 or less, it’s considered low risk.
For women, a low risk score is 0.8 or lower, while moderate risk is 0.81 to 0.85 and 0.85 or higher.
In men it is 0.95 or less, 0.96 to 1 or 1 or more.
Studies have shown that this extra weight around the abdomen can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Researchers in 2018 from the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, USA, and St Anne’s University Hospital in the Czech Republic, compared BMI with waist-to-hip measurements.
The researchers found that those with a normal weight but with more fat around the stomach had an 87 percent increased risk of problems, compared with those who did not store their weight around the abdomen.
The results also suggested that participants were 52 percent more likely to be at increased risk of diabetes and high cholesterol if they were weight-bearing around their waists.
A study presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Stockholm also advocates ditching BMI in favor of waist-hip ratio.
The researchers measured the likelihood that a person would die prematurely based on their BMI, waist-hip ratio, or fat mass index (FMI), which represents the amount of fat someone has compared to their height.
The results showed that having a higher waist-to-hip ratio increased the risk of death linearly.