Is BMI right?

britt8808
britt8808 Posts: 18 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
ok guys, I am 5'7'' and can run 6 miles without an issue. I weight in at 162 right now but according to BMI I am still overweight (close to normal but overweight). I recently went to the gym and had the body fat test (the one you hold like a steering wheel) and it said I am 26% body fat. SO I guess my question is am I crazy for thinking I am at a healthy weight where I am (I actually feel healthier at 165) or has society just conditioned me to believe I should weight more then is healthy?

Is BMI right?

Replies

  • wheird
    wheird Posts: 7,963 Member
    That BF test isnt all that accurate.

    BMI is flawed when applied to the individual. It is meant to give an overview of the health of a population in a given region, not to measure the health of an individual.
  • Followingsea
    Followingsea Posts: 407 Member
    As Reality_Is_Harsh said, BMI is really meant to be a population tracker, particularly coupled with a time component (literally: population growth over time).

    It has a lot of features that make it much less useful as a tracker for individuals.

    Among them -

    * it can't differentiate between bone tissue, fatty tissue, or muscle tissue, so it overestimates BMI for athletes and underestimates it for couch potatoes

    * the way the formula is constructed means that larger individuals will always have a larger BMI than smaller counterparts with the same body composition/structure

    * it doesn't take into account aging factors, so it's not that great for elderly people (as you get older, you shrink!)

    * the numbers for normal/overweight/obese are pretty arbitrary and don't match up very well with weight/height/body fat percentages done on decent sample size populations

    So: no, not that useful

    *

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