What’s a healthy weight for my size?

If you type this question into Google, the first page of results will all be body mass index calculators.

Body mass index, or BMI for short, is a simple formula that (attempts) to calculate if you're a healthy weight for your height 👍👎

You input your height and weight, and it tells you if you're underweight, healthy, overweight or obese.

Here's my score 👇

You can calculate your BMI here.

My initial plan for this blog was to cover the pros and cons of BMI but after researching it extensively...

I've decided that in most cases it just doesn’t work.

(I promise I'm not biased based on my result 😜)

Keep reading to find out why, and I’ll also outline a better approach to measuring your health.

The big problem with BMI...

Is that it treats fat and muscle the same, which massively undermines its validity in three ways.

❌ BMI wrongly classifies people with athletic builds (like me) as being overweight.

My BMI is 25.9, which is overweight, but I'd have to be as lean as a competitive bodybuilder to sneak into the upper end of the healthy range for my height 🏋️‍♂️

❌ The target ranges for 'healthy' are WAY TOO BIG and potentially unobtainable.

According to BMI, the healthy weight range for somebody of my height is 62kg to 83.7kg – That's a 21.7kg gap! 🤯

If I weighed 62kg and gained weight by adding muscle, then I agree with the formula that I'd still be healthy ✅

But surely, I can't gain 21.7kg of fat and still be considered healthy?! 🤦‍♂️

❌ BMI ignores gender and age differences in body fat percentage.

Women have more body fat than men of the same height and weight but enter the same data into the above BMI calculator (only changing the sex) and the BMI result is the same! 🤔

The same difference also tends to be true for older vs younger people.

It just doesn’t make sense for everybody to use the same formula 🤷‍♂️

But not everybody is an athlete JT...

True, and I do think BMI can be a useful wake-up call for people who are overweight or obese due to carrying extra body fat 📞

I calculated the BMIs of 25 randomly selected Reboot clients and everybody who scored as being overweight or obese joined wanting to lose a significant amount of weight 🙋‍♂️

So, maybe use it as motivation to get started, but I still wouldn't recommend using it as your primary goal - here's why:

Weight isn't the perfect measure of health.

My final point, and the punchline to this email, is that there's no magic formula that can tell you exactly how much you should weigh to be healthy 🧙‍♂️

That's because your weight and body composition are just one part of what it means to be healthy.

There are lots of unhealthy ways that an overweight or obese person could use to try and lose weight 🙈

And I know a lot of lean people who are also sleep deprived, chronically stressed, smoke and eat a micronutrient deficient diet 🤒

When it comes to your health, all the evidence suggests that you should focus on following a healthy lifestyle, rather than aiming for a specific weight on the scales.

That means:

• Performing intense physical activity several times a week 🏋️‍♀️

• Walking at least 5,000 steps a day 🚶‍♂️

• Sleeping 7-9 hours per night 😴, and

• Eating a well-balanced, nutrient-rich diet 🥦

Following these guidelines will have health benefits whether you lose weight or not 👨‍⚕️

But they will also make it much more difficult to overeat.

So, if your BMI is higher than you’d like due to extra body fat, don't be surprised if you end up losing weight! 😜

How to find your happy weight

Once you've established a healthy lifestyle, where you decide to settle on the scales is up to you.

I call this your ‘happy weight’ 🙂

The goal is to:

• Achieve a look that you're happy with, and

• Can maintain by following a lifestyle you enjoy 💃🕺

The second part is really important, as getting super-lean comes with certain lifestyle trade-offs that you might not be willing to make.

Daily weigh-ins are a helpful tool while losing weight, but long-term you may decide to ditch them and use other measures like clothing fit, for example, wanting to fit into a specific dress or trouser size 👗👖

Once you've found your 'happy weight', the goal is to maintain it, which is a topic for another email!