Skinny Or Fatty, Objective Analysis Required...

A number of objective ways for you to check whether you are the right weight

Are you fat or are you thin?  A large percentage of people are not actually aware of the reality of their weight. In some cases individuals think that they are overweight when in fact their weight is perfectly healthy or they are even underweight, (this can lead to anorexia), and in other cases people fool themselves into believing they are a normal weight when they are actually carrying too many pounds of fat.

There are number of objective ways for you to check whether you are the right weight or not. The first thing to do is to undertake a BMI analysis of your weight. To do this you can either use one of the many BMI calculators online or you can do it yourself by dividing your weight by into your height squared. For example if you are 1.8 ms tall and you weigh 75 kilos the calculation you will need to do will be 75/(1.8x1.8) = 23.15. Your BMI should ideally be between 20 and 25; if it is over 25 it means you are overweight and over 30 means you are suffering from obesity.

There are some people however who say that the BMI is not always a reliable way to assess the healthy weight of a person especially if you are short and muscular. The problem with BMI is that it is not able to assess the difference between muscle and fat and thus it may also give healthy readings for people who have poor muscle tone and excess stomach fat.

Another method for checking whether you are overweight or not is the extremely simple way  of circumference measurement which some doctors say is far more reliable for assessing the likelihood of obesity related illnesses. Put simply if you have a waist which is more than 40in. for a man or more than 35in. for a woman you should be losing some weight.

A more sophisticated way of measuring to see if you are overweight is to examine your waist hip ratio. To do this you should get the measurement of your waist at its thinnest point and divide the result by your largest hip measurement. Doctors say that healthy men should end up with a figure of maximum 0.9 and healthy women should not have a result of more than 0.85.

You need to be objective about your weight and honest with yourself. Sometimes a simple thing like noticing that your jeans are tight is all that is required to really know that you have put on weight. As a last resort go and see a doctor who will be able to examine you probably can tell you if you need to lose weight.