There has been some controversy in recent days over the validity of Body Mass Index (BMI) as a tool to measure if you're a fatty or not.
For years, the BMI has been considered the standard measure of obesity. It takes into account a person's weight and height and comes up with a percentage that indicates whether the individual is overweight or not.
An article in the New York Times on Monday, Weight Index Doesn’t Tell the Whole Truth, challenges the validity of the tool because it doesn't account for differences in weight between fatty and lean tissue.
Here at Canadian Living, we've run a few articles over the years touting the merits of the BMI as a tool to help you help you keep your weight in check, like this one:
Decode your BMI: Learn what it is, how to improve yours, and why you should know your rating.
We've also questioned the value of the BMI against other measurement tools, like in this article:
Waist to hip ratio beats BMI: A new way of measuring your heart health.
A while back, Kate Harding of the awesome Shapely Prose blog created the eye-opening Illustrated BMI Categories Project to show what people deemed "underweight," "normal," "overweight" and "morbidly obese" by the BMI index really look like. (You can see the project's Flickr pool here. )
According to the BMI, I'm seven pounds overweight right now, and in my case, my tight waistbands agree. But in your case, it could be that the BMI indicates that you're overweight but really you're just super muscular and at a perfectly healthy weight. (Sadly, this is for sure not true for me.)
Do you use your BMI to help you determine what a healthy weight is? Do you find it accurate for your body? Do you think it's way off? Post a comment and let us know.
