Height To Weight Ratio

Now this one is always a funny one in my book. Yesterday I had a height & weight assessment done whilst passing an NHS stall in the town centre. The result was that I was overweight!! I'm 5ft 11" and weigh 14 stones and can pinch an inch around my waist. Remembering, of course, that muscle is heaver that fat. Even the girl who did the test grinned broadly with the result. She gave me a list of things with a calorie count on them and I complained because it didn't mention beer!!:whistling:

I remember once going to the doctors during my military service to pick a prescription up for my mother. The height and weight ratio calculators had just come out then and the doctor ran the test by me. The result, even back then, was that I was over weight and the doctor just smiled and told me that the test was a pile of crap, just before he threw the weight calculator into the bin. LOL.

After this test, I walked further down the shopping mall and gazed at the many passers-by, thinking to myself, "I bet when some of these people pass the chemist, the weighing machine runs in and locks the doors."!!!


Cheers

Steve

For being "scientific," those things are absolute crap. I'm 5'7 and have a wide range in weight from 180-210. My suggested "ideal" weight is 160. At 180, people tell me I'm too thin and that I'd better quit my diet or my kidneys will shut down or something. Yet, at 180, I'm overweight.....oh brother.

Isn't the waist:hip ratio a more useful indicator of porkiness? The BMI is really only designed for people who lead a largely sedentary lifestyle. Take the BMI of any rugby player and they're likely to come out as clinically obese. It's simply not meant for people with a muscular body type.

Waist to hip still isn't perfect, but it's pretty good for determining risk levels for a fair few diseases. Unless you get proper measurements taken, you're never going to get more than a rough and ready number anyway. There's the height and circumference method for estimating body fat, but I've not heard much about that one.

im not as cinical as to take one of those tests