Find Out If You Are Slim or Fat
This is a commonly asked question. Presence of excess fat in the body is not very difficult to appreciate. When one has fatty, soft, bulges in different places and a bulging tummy, it is not difficult to assess oneself as overweight. It is much easier to assess obesity. To be in a better shape, one has to have healthy subcutaneous fat without having any bulges or a paunch.
One can use any standard ‘height-for-weight-chart’ to find out his or her normal weight. Your weight should fit into the range prescribed for your height, but it is again more important to make sure that you have healthy subcutaneous fat without having any bulges or a paunch.
An average person, who wants to get down to his correct weight and become healthy, truly does not need a great deal of technical evaluation of his being overweight or obese.
There are other and what are considered to be more scientific parameters of finding an answer to this question. But these systems, too, have to be used with common sense.
One of them is the body-mass index or the B.M.I. You can assess your B.M.I. by using the following formula –
B.M.I. = Weight (kg) / [Height (m)] 2
Once you calculate your B.M.I., you can use the following table to find out your health status.
| B.M.I. | HEALTH STATUS |
| Up to 18.5 | You are underweight. |
| 18.5 to 24.9 | Your weight is healthy. |
| 25 to 29.9 | You are overweight. You need to lose weight. |
| 30 and above | You are obese, and at a health risk. You must lose weight. |
This system can go haywire if you have a perfect B.M.I., and then put on ten kg muscle mass. This system will then wrongly assess you as overweight or even obese.
Other parameters are the waist measurement and the waist-to-hip ratio. A waist measurement of more than 80 cm in women and 94 cm in men are considered to be dangerous. You are more likely to develop high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes and also some types of cancers, if your waist measures more than the above figures. One problem of using these parameters is that the level where the abdominal girth should be measured has not been clearly defined.
The best method for average people to know their healthy weight, therefore, is the earlier mentioned method of self-assessment.
Also read the article ‘Diseases Associated With Obesity‘ on this website. All our contact details are available on the ‘Contact Us’ page of this website. Get in touch with us through the ‘Contact Us’ page on this website.