Author: Dr. Bryce Hendy, DC, DNCert
Have you ever been to your healthcare provider and they bring up BMI and tell you that based on your current BMI you are underweight, or overweight or considered obese? Well there is likely more that needs to be taken into consideration before making these claims just based on your current weight and height.
Your weight= your current mass, typically measured in pounds in the United States and can be measured in kilograms in other countries.
Your Height=your total body height measured in inches and translated to feet in the United States and can be measured in meters
BMI: a calculation that takes into consideration a person’s height and weight and is an estimate to measure a person’s body fat percentage.
One thing that is not considered when measuring a person’s BMI is their muscle mass and body composition, even though the goal with BMI is to measure a person’s body fat percentage. This means that someone who is very fit and has more muscle mass could have the same BMI as someone with less muscle mass and more body fat. Due to body composition not being considered in BMI, this does not give us a good indication how the fat is distributed over the body. Someone could have a low BMI, but high visceral fat (fat around the organs) which would mean they have a higher health risk. Here is how the BMI numbers are broken down:
- <18.5=underweight
- 18.5-24.9=healthy weight
- 25-29.9=overweight
- 30+=obese
So, let’s say that you are someone who has been working out with the goal of getting in better shape and getting stronger, this likely means that you are putting on muscle and likely lean muscle mass. If you had your BMI taken prior to starting working out and 6 months into your routine, you could end up with the same BMI. The issue with the BMI measurement is that this can sometimes cause people to give up on their routines because this number isn’t changing or in some cases the number goes up. This can be disheartening for someone working towards overall better health.
A better measurement to gauge your health off of is going to be a body composition scan. This is a more comprehensive measurement which will help tell the distribution and proportion of different tissues in the body, such as bone, fat, muscle and water content. This will eliminate the issues discussed previously with BMI by telling you what percentage of your weight is related to muscle vs fat vs bone vs water. This is a great measurement to have that you can compare to a BMI measurement and if you have a higher BMI, you can look at the body composition results and decipher that the higher BMI is due to what your results of the body composition tell you.
This is important for people to know and use to help them make decisions for their overall health and wellness. One thing to consider with our weight is how this can affect our bones and joint health as well. The body is good at making sure our bones are as sturdy as possible to help support our mass. So as our body weight increases, whether due to fat or muscle, our bones will grow and develop to support these changes. This can also affect how joints move and the wear and tear on our joints. The more mass a joint supports through a movement the more stress is placed on the joint and the surrounding soft tissues. This can lead to changes in the joints and oftentimes these changes are not good, like arthritis and damage to the cartilage in our joints. With care at Acacia we can help manage pain related to weight management as well as nutritional and weight loss help, to get you back on track for your health and wellness goals and keep you feeling your best while doing so.
