BMI Calculator

jerseynomad

What the Frack is going on? I just did the BMI Calculator here on this web page and it tells me for a guy 5'10", healthy weight with a BMI <18.5% should be 123 - 174 lbs. What 5'10" guy is 123 lbs. That is crazy!!!! I'm all for losing weight but they need to seriously look at what is healthy and what isn't. Does anyone know anybody that is 5'10" and 150?? I think that is part of the problem today. On my first physical 4 years ago with a new doc, she took me aside and showed me one of those stupid charts for BMI. Needless to say I havent gone back to her since. Not because I was upset I was fat, but even when I was in the Air force running 3 miles a day, I was 188lbs. I was still consided overweight and had to get special permission to be so. Even though my BMI was around 23%, I was in the best shape of my life. Now I know I'm ranting here, but people need to remember a number is just a number and how healthy your overall self is and not just what a stupid BMI calculator says.

SHBoss1673

What the Frack is going on? I just did the BMI Calculator here on this web page and it tells me for a guy 5'10", healthy weight with a BMI <18.5% should be 123 - 174 lbs. What 5'10" guy is 123 lbs. That is crazy!!!! I'm all for losing weight but they need to seriously look at what is healthy and what isn't. Does anyone know anybody that is 5'10" and 150?? I think that is part of the problem today. On my first physical 4 years ago with a new doc, she took me aside and showed me one of those stupid charts for BMI. Needless to say I havent gone back to her since. Not because I was upset I was fat, but even when I was in the Air force running 3 miles a day, I was 188lbs. I was still consided overweight and had to get special permission to be so. Even though my BMI was around 23%, I was in the best shape of my life. Now I know I'm ranting here, but people need to remember a number is just a number and how healthy your overall self is and not just what a stupid BMI calculator says.

BMI is different from Body Fat %

A BMI of 18 is at the VERY low end of healthy, on the edge of starvation. You want your BMI ultimately to be between 20 and 25 (it's not a percentage, it's just a number). Where a healthy guy's Body Fat % should be somewhere between 6% and 15% usually (a little higher is ok, but anything above 20% is bad for guys). A BMI of 18 usually means (assuming nothing odd is going on) that you have very low lean tissue mass in the body relatively speaking.

FrenchMob

BMI is such an outdated way to measure someones "health" it should outlawed. I'm also 5'10" and have 164 lbs of LBM. Even if I had only 5% body fat (fitness competition levels), I would just be barely below the upper limit of "Healthy/Normal". It's ridiculous. At 12% BF, that puts me at about 185 lbs, and "Overweight" according to BMI.

That BMI calculator shouldn't even be on this site.

spritie

Thats because BMI is such a innaccurate measure of health. It can be affected by too many factors such as bone density, FFM, FM ratios, build etc. BMI is quite inaccurate especially in athletic populations as the amount of high density FFM skews the results upwards.

This is why health professionals are moving away from BMI (everyone should be really) and using measures such as waist-hip ratio and BF%, much more accurate link to health.

BMI is just a good general guide to help people understand where they stand (as many people are in denial about how far there size is from healthy (especially people in the obese and morbid obese catagories). And especially for quite large individuals its an easy quick non-invasive way to guage progress etc. Thats the only real reason its still around.

As such it shouldnt be taken ridiculously seriously.

Sorry if thats quite rambly its quite late here right now.