Determining BMI, and Its Importance

BY ANDREW

I have a rest­ing heart rate of 57 beats per minute. When I am cycling hard, my heart rate can go in to the mid 180’s and I feel fine. I have gained one waist size in the last 15 years, now I am a 34 and dur­ing that time I have gained 20 pounds. Accord­ing to the CDC I am well into the over­weight cat­e­gory on my way to being very close to obese with a BMI of 27.5. Maybe a lit­tle love han­dles and small man-boobs, but close to obese? Excuse my acronyms, but WTF.

In order to find some cor­re­la­tion with me and my BMI I started search­ing the inter­net for some sort of expla­na­tion, the first thing I came across was an arti­cle that had been posted on the NPR site, Top 10 Rea­sons Why The BMI Is Bogus. Hmm, this got me think­ing. There is a rela­tion­ship between mus­cle mass and BMI which all of the BMI cal­cu­la­tors do not take in to account. It also reminded me that my Tanita scale (which cal­cu­lates BMI) is telling me that I have a BMI of 11%, this I am pretty sure is low, but some­where there has to be an accu­rate and easy way for you to find out how seden­tary you can be before hav­ing to worry about things.

On the Live­strong web site there is an arti­cle enti­tled BMI vs. Body Fat. The arti­cle goes into describ­ing the the inter­pre­ta­tions of the body mass index and where these cal­cu­la­tions put peo­ple. At the end of the arti­cle, it is noted that the stan­dard BMI cal­cu­la­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant excep­tion, that of highly-trained ath­letes. I am not a highly-trained ath­lete, but some­times think that I am OK shape so maybe this com­ment might apply to me.

WebMD has a BMI Plus Cal­cu­la­tor. It takes pant size as well as all of the other “stuff” and asks you for goals as well as your activ­ity level. Once you have plugged it all in it does not seem to do any­thing, maybe if it did work it would pro­vide some more per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion than the stan­dard calculation.

So of all of the things that peo­ple seem to rely on is the Body Fat Test. It involves a num­ber of things includ­ing a water tank. The basis for the test dates back to Greek times and how much our bod­ies dis­place and with this one is meant to get an accu­rate read­ing of ones body com­po­si­tion. I have never done it, but I am told that it works.

In any case, I think that for peo­ple who are work­ing out on a daily basis a con­ven­tional BMI test does not give you an accu­rate read­ing of where you or I stand so take it with a grain of salt and keep watch­ing your diet and work­ing out.

Editor’s note: the photo is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of mea­sur­ing BMI, but not nec­es­sar­ily a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Andrew’s feet. IMAGE CREDIT: OnCalc​.com

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