Body Mass Index and Healthy Living

Are you mak­ing New Year’s goals?

This time of year it is easy to look in the mir­ror and think about set­ting New Year’s res­o­lu­tions around los­ing weight. A lot of us work in absolutes. For exam­ple, if I am 5’4”, then I should weigh 120 pounds, or if my BMI is 30 then I am obese. Weight is def­i­nite­ly a fac­tor when it comes to health, but so are all the behav­iors asso­ci­at­ed with healthy bod­ies like reg­u­lar phys­i­cal activ­i­ty, healthy eat­ing, stress man­age­ment, and abstain­ing from sub­stance abuse. Weight alone is not the only thing that counts in health, and tools like BMI may be easy to cal­cu­late, but they are not the only num­ber that mat­ters to deter­mine well-being.

What is BMI?

BMI is a tool but not the end-all-be-all defin­ing fac­tor of our lives. BMI or ​“body mass index” is a mea­sure of someone’s weight in kilo­grams divid­ed by their height in meters squared. The num­ber this gives us is used to gauge if some­one is poten­tial­ly car­ry­ing excess fat for their size. BMI alone does not take into account dai­ly habits, mus­cle mass, water reten­tion, or a vari­ety of oth­er fac­tors. At the end of the day, this num­ber is, well, just a num­ber. What­ev­er your BMI is should not keep you awake at night. Instead of stress­ing about your BMI, I rec­om­mend focus­ing on behav­iors that can improve mobil­i­ty, ener­gy lev­els, flex­i­bil­i­ty, or nutri­tion status.

How much does BMI matter?

QMG Well­ness Chef, Sier­ra, gra­cious­ly allowed me to write about her this week as an expla­na­tion on how BMI does not always give us all the answers. Sier­ra and I are both very healthy peo­ple. We both work out reg­u­lar­ly, we bond over our love of unique fruits and veg­gies, eat out infre­quent­ly, man­age stress, and stay well hydrat­ed. Say­ing this, we eat very dif­fer­ent meals, have com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent work­out rou­tines, and dif­fer­ent BMI values.

Bot­tom Line:

Just look­ing at some­one is not a way to assess health, and just look­ing at BMI does not give us all the answers either. Sier­ra tech­ni­cal­ly weighs more than me, but she does Cross­fit almost every day and is incred­i­bly mus­cu­lar (it is super amaz­ing). In fact, my body fat per­cent­age is actu­al­ly about 5% HIGH­ER even though my BMI is low­er than hers. Again, just look­ing at some­one is not a way to deter­mine health. Lab­o­ra­to­ry data, com­po­si­tion analy­sis, and health his­to­ry ques­tion­naires all assist health­care prac­ti­tion­ers in deter­min­ing an individual’s health sta­tus. I may weigh less, but Sier­ra has a lot more mus­cle than me. In fact, if you were to go to the gym with us, Sier­ra can lift about four times as much as I can. As a chef, she eats a very health­ful and fla­vor­ful diet packed with lean pro­teins, while I eat plant-foods most of the day. Although our fit­ness and dietary habits are dif­fer­ent, both of our annu­al labs looked good and we would def­i­nite­ly both con­sid­er the oth­er healthy.

This year when deter­min­ing your health goals, instead of say­ing ​“I want to lose weight”, choose to work on things like being more active, reduc­ing processed snack foods, elim­i­nat­ing sug­ary bev­er­ages, or oth­er behav­iors that influ­ence health. Take care of your­self this year.

For more infor­ma­tion or to speak with a Reg­is­tered Dietit­ian, call 217−222−6550, ext. 3481.