A Consideration Of BMI

A Consideration Of BMI
As overweight and obesity has become more and more
epidemic, particularly in the United States, tools that
assist in weight control have become more prevalent. A
method used in weight control that has become particularly
popular in recent times is the Body Mass Index, or BMI for
short. The Body Mass Index is, to put it simply, a means
for determining a person's ideal body weight.

Though the Body Mass Index has become widely familiar over
the last decade or so, the notion of using an index to
determine ideal body weight has been in existence for over
one hundred years. In the nineteenth century, a
statistician from Belgium devised a mathematical formula
for measuring obesity. The statistician's name was Adolphe
Quetelet and the formula he devised to measure obesity was,
appropriately enough, called the Quetelet Index of Obesity.
The Body Mass Index is, for all intents and purposes, an
updated description of the Quetelet Index of Obesity.

The Body Mass Index, or the Quetelet Index of Obesity, uses
a mathematical formula to determine a healthy weight. The
Body Mass Index is not just a diagnostic for overweight,
however, but offers a diagnosis for underweight as well.
The formula used by the Body Mass Index to determine a
person's weight health is body weight divided by height
squared.

The BMI became popular in medical circles during the
1980's. Prior to this, objective considerations of body
weight were based solely on how tall a person was. The
problem with this sort of measurement was that it was too
narrow in its consideration of a person's body composition,
and didn't offer enough information about a person's
physical make up and where he or she stood in relation to
ideal body weight.

The Body Mass Index provided a particularly detailed
analysis of body composition along with standards for
healthy and unhealthy ranges of body weight, and the BMI
became the universal standard for body weight
considerations during the 1980's. In the 1990's, as issues
of overweight became more significant, US government
efforts to encourage better health resulted in Body Mass
Index discussion on a much wider scale, and beyond the
medical profession.

Today, so-called Body Mass Index calculators are widely
available on the web. Virtually anyone can now plug in
their height and weight measurements and get a BMI weight
composition reading. The problem with the widespread use of
BMI as some form of authority for body health is that BMI
is and always was meant to be used as a way of classifying
body components of people with extreme weights,
particularly obese persons. In other words, BMI was
essentially developed to categorize the bodies of obese
people, and expanding its use beyond this original intent
and expecting perfect results is not particularly
realistic.

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Zinn Jeremiah is a freelance author. To find help with
weight loss, visit http://www.hubonline.biz/lose-now.htm or
http://www.hubonline.biz/get-fit.htm .