Body Mass Index

What is your body mass index?

The body mass index is known as BMI and is a measure of how healthy you are in terms of how much you weigh relative to your height and weight.

There are industry published figures about the average body mass index for a person of a given weight and height.

Therefore by calculating your body mass index you can see how you conform to those standards and how healthy you are in these terms as a result.

If you are below the average body mass index, then you are underweight and unhealthy in this way. If you are above it however then this indicates that you are overweight relative to this scheme and therefore in danger of issues relating to being overweight.

Working out body mass index

This is quite easy to do, as follows:

- First, find out how tall you are. Stand against a wall and get a friend to use a tape measure to work out your height in metres.

- Next, get your weight in kilograms through your trusty weighing scales

- Now do some simple maths. Just multiply the height by itself. Then divide your weight by this figure to find your body mass index.

So if you have a height 1.7 metres and a weight of 65kg, then work out 1.7 x 1.7 and then divide 65 by the result to get your answer.

A healthy body mass index is somewhere in the range between 18.5 and 25, so this is a useful guide to whether you are healthy in this respect or not.

If you are not familiar with metres and kilograms or have equipment that uses other measures, then there are many online calculators that you can use which perform this for you.

Here is a useful link I found for a body mass calculator:

http://www.nhsdirect.uk/interactiveTools/bmi.aspx

Body Mass Index

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Last Updated: Sep 25th 2006

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