The Body Mass Indicator

Using the Body Mass Indicator to Assess Overall Health

The following information has been gathered and compiled through personal experience while traveling, teaching T'ai Chi, Qi Gong, Chinese Herbal medicine, health and wellness, martial arts and contains feedback from students and anecdotal information from readers of my columns. The following are my opinions and deductions from those sources.

Body Mass Indicator charts are designed primarily as a tool for doctors and researchers in order for them to have a benchmark to evaluate statistics on health related to overweight, obesity and the diseases connected with those conditions. There has to be some plateau or foundation, otherwise they have no starting point. The BMI is an average only, and not necessarily an indicator of fitness and overall health.

Using BMI chart information, anyone with a BMI over twenty-five is considered overweight and if they are over thirty, they are considered obese. One of the things that's not taken into consideration, because of averaging and the fact that most people in the US carry their extra weight in fat, is that muscle weighs more than fat. If you are in shape, and you're body fat is low but your muscle mass is high, you would probably be classified as overweight according to BMI charts.

BMI takes height into consideration when calculating overweight but that still doesn't account for muscle mass and the difference in weight between fat and muscle. For instance, many world class athletes, sprinters, weight lifters, but usually not distance athletes, have a very low body fat percentage and they weigh in above the BMI for overweight because they are muscle mass dense.

The BMI system is a tool primarily for those who are involved with overweight and obesity research, the impact it has on health, and they work with large groups. Using the BMI system, they can gather written information from other studies and from telephone conversations. Since the patient or study participant may never be seen, this type of information gathering doesn't take overall fitness into consideration. In order to find exactly what a person's body fat percentage are, requires expensive equipment, lots of research money and large amounts of time. By using averaging with the BMI system, which is less than optimum for those who don't fall in the "average" category, it's possible to gather and process lots of information.

Another way to determine if you are overweight is use your eyes and head. Look in the mirror, you know if you are overweight. If you have carried excess body fat for years and have become accustomed to how you look with the extra, un-healthful fat, you have to visualize how you should look and feel, not what you have become accustomed to. Overweight is a misnomer. To more correctly name the problem would be to call it "overfat."

Being overfat is detrimental to health, being overweight according to BMI charts may not be, if you are otherwise fit, healthy and have a low body fat percentage. Using the scale and your height as the indicators of fitness may lull into a false sense of health. You can be overweight and fit, thin and fit and be healthy in both respects. But, you can not be overweight or thin and unfit, and be healthy.