Why you need to ditch BMI for better ways to assess your health
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There used to be a time when upon joining a gym, the first thing trainers would make you do would be to stand on a BMI (body mass index) machine, enter your height and weight, and wait while it whirred and spat out a receipt with your number. While BMI is basically a value derived from the mass (weight) and height of a person, the machine would also give data on visceral fat, real age and other determinants that could either be impressive or scary or both.
But over the past two or three years, especially with new research shedding light on the drawbacks of BMI, the machines have vanished from the gyms, and hardly anyone is talking about the metric. The BMI metre, which asks for age, height and weight, is measured in kg/m². Anything less than 18.5 is underweight, from 18.5 to 25 is normal, 25 to 30 is overweight and anything above that is marked as obesity.
For the longest time, my BMI would be below the required level (less than 18.5), which always translated to “eat more, lift heavy". This is not to say the strategy was incorrect, but BMI was just half the story pretending to be the full. “A person with lots of muscle and minimal body fat can have the same BMI as a person with obesity who has much less muscle.
BMI also varies (because average body fatness varies) among people of different ages and whether they are active or sedentary. That means it can be misleading in some cases. For instance, an athlete with much more muscle than fat can have a BMI in the overweight range," states a Yale Medicine article titled, Why You Shouldn’t Rely On BMI Alone.
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