Weight management is a hard job and requires a lot of hard work. A nutritious diet with daily exercise can help in balancing your weight. Inch loss and weight loss are also two very different things. You might be overweight according your age, but your body fat says otherwise. Well, factors like bone mass, fat storage, water retention, age, gender etc come into consideration. Have you ever heard about Body mass index (BMI)? It is a popular measurement that is used by many health professionals to check if your body weight is healthy or not. And then accordingly, people take appropriate steps to attain the ideal weight. Basically, BMI gives information about your health after comparing your body's weight to your height. Since many years, people have been considering Body mass index as the standard measure for knowing about their health. BMI divides an individual's weight status into different categories like underweight, normal weight, overweight, obesity class I, obesity class II and obesity class III. In this article, you will get to know if BMI is the perfect measure of health and why.
The chart to determine the category is:
- Underweight Less than 18.5
- Recommended 18.6 to 24.9
- Overweight 25.0 to 29.9
- Obese 30 or greater
Why BMI is not a good measure of health?
Now, the question arises that is BMI even a reliable and accurate measure of health? You have to know the importance and accuracy of this number in order to take care of your health. Many health care practitioners believe that this is not the finest choice to know if you're healthy. Listed below are some reasons for the same:
- Only a measure of body size: BMI might be easy, cheap and quick but it is just merely a way of diagnosing weight and height together. It only take the measure of your body size and does not consider the disease and health conditions. This is an incomplete way of showing the results. Body mass index exactly doesn't measure the body fat but just gives a sign of its risk.
- Not correct for athletes: Athletes work very hard and have a heavy schedule of physical activity. A very common problem that people face is that if they are fit and strong, their BMI shows otherwise. It classes some as OVERWEIGHT! That happens because with strong individuals like athletes that take a high nutrition diet and workout a lot which leads to muscle gain and resulting in increased BMI.
- Random results: Shockingly, BMI categories show random results sometimes. You cannot rely on the accuracy of BMI observe further health risks of a person. This measurement may often categorise you as overweight, even if you have a high fat percentage and come in the obese level.
- Ignores gender and age: Another weakness of giving BMI all power is that it ignores a person's age and gender. Not taking this factor in consideration can be a huge reason of not getting your expectations fulfilled from this measurement. There is a huge difference between the height and weight of a male, female, senior citizen and a young adult.
- Doesn't consider bone mass and fat storage: Every individual has a different kind of body. BMI does not even consider the bone mass and fat storage of an individual. Some have dense and heavy bones while some have denser muscles than fat. BMI ignores these things and just gives you an overall result.
Conclusion
These are the disadvantages of interrelating BMI and health. Your health cannot be always trusted and determined through Body Mass Index. You can try testing your fat percentage, talking to a medical professional or go for other alternatives too. Therefore, BMI will be helpful only to give an indication of your health status without weighing many other factors.
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