Body Mass Index is a health term we’re seeing a lot of lately. It is the government’s official way of checking up on the ‘obesity epidemic.’

The problem is that BMI is a horrible way for you to measure your health. From Sue Widemark:

BMI or Body Mass Index is based on weight alone.

Just weight. It makes no distinctions for age. It makes no distinctions for muscle mass and it doesn’t even distinguish between male and female. This rigid measurement is being aggressively ’sold’ to Health Care professionals as ‘more convenient’ than the weight charts.
It also puts 55 percent of the American people ‘at risk’ because of ‘obesity’ since anyone with a BMI over 24 is considered ‘at risk’, weightwise.

The fallacy of this is, of course, that most of the athletes in the peak of condition are now, according to BMI standards, at risk. This is understandable because athletes are often quite muscular but BMI scoring does not allow for the percentage of muscle mass and muscle weighs 4 times heavier than fat.

Scale photo by A is for Angie