by Sageera EIC

How do Doctors assess risk from being overweight?

Researchers have looked at many ways to come up with ways to easily and quickly measure risk factors that increase disease from overweight. They came up with the following three ways of assessing your risk, mostly closely matching the bad belly fat:

1. Measure waist size
   
2. Look at weight gain since your mid 20’s.
   
3. Measure your Body Mass Index (BMI)
   

Measuring waist size is as easy as it reads: Measure around the height of your belly button, keeping the measuring tape horizontally. The National Institute of Health says that waist sizes larger then 40 inches for men, and 35 inches for women are too much. Risk for diseases are significantly increased.

The other very easy datapoint is your weight gain since your early 20’s. If you gained more than 10 pounds since your 21st birthday, chances are these extra pounds are not from muscles. It’s a great rule of thumb. And, by the way, age alone is NOT an excuse for weight gain.

Your Body Mass Index (BMI) and the SageEra BMI Calculator and Scale

The third tool is body mass index (BMI). First you measure weight AND height. Then, BMI is Weight divided by Height, again divided by Height. This is true when you measure weight in kilograms and height in meters. In the U.S., when you use pounds and inches, multiply the above number by 703.

Metric (use kg, m):
BMI = (Weight / Height) / Height

U.S. (use lbs, in):
BMI = (Weight / Height) / Height * 703

The BMI translates into weight categories as follows:

1. Lower than 18.5: underweight
   
2. 18.5 to 25: normal weight
   
3. 25-30: overweight
   
4. 30-35: obese I
   
5. 35-40: obese II
   
6. above 40: morbidly obese.
   

These numbers are used world-wide, by the World Health Organization (WHO), and nationally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes for Health (NIH), to track of the world-wide and U.S. epidemic of obesity.

There are a few limitations of using these weight categories based on BMI that you should be aware of: for children and teenagers it doesn’t work this way. Their body proportions are still developing and the medical profession will apply adjusted formulas for them. Use the above ranges for people above 20 years old. Also, for people with a lot of muscles, the BMI is a high number, without them being too fat. Muscles are relatively heavy, and the BMI gives a misleadingly high number. However, if you were an athlete or body builder, I am sure you would know, and you wouldn’t be concerned about your BMI being too high.

There is that website on the Internet, sponsored by the food processing lobby. They say that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s BMI would put him into the “obese” category, and therefore BMI is misleading. That’s nonsense! Of course, we know what a great body builder Arnold is, and he shouldn’t use BMI as an indicator for his health. Arnold knows his muscles are heavy. For the rest of us, BMI IS THE MOST IMPORTANT DIAGNOSTIC TOOL the health community uses to calculate your weight category and therefore assess your health risks from overweight.

Knowing how important the BMI is, and how awkward it is to calculate it, we looked around on the Internet for BMI calculators, and we found some that do the simple arithmetic. They might say that your BMI is 26 and you are overweight. However, there was no tool that shows you easily, like on a bathroom scale, how many pounds you are overweight or away from that weight loss target. Therefore, we have developed the SageEra BMI Calculator and Scale, a fun way to calculate your BMI and track your path toward your weight goal. It shows both, your BMI and weight, on an easy-to-use bathroom scale display. It’s so unique that our patent lawyers filed a patent on it.

You find the SageEra BMI Calculator and Scale at www.sageera.com/bmi. You can use it for yourself, and share it with friends through its Tell-A-Friend Feature.