What Is A Healthy Weight?

What seems to be a simple question turns out to be remarkably difficult to an­swer. Part of the problem is that a weight that may be perfectly fine for some­one who is six feet one—say, 175 pounds—is way too much for someone who is five feet one. Another part is lingering confusion from the way healthy weights have been defined in the past.

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A number called the "body mass index," or "Quetelet index," gets around the first problem. This measure of weight adjusted for height does a good job of accounting for the fact that taller people weigh more than shorter people. If you like math, you can calculate your body mass index, or BMI, like this: Divide your weight in pounds by your height in inches; divide that number by your height in inches; and multiply that number by 703. You can also just look it up  or have it calculated for you by any number of on-line BMI calculators, such as the one on the Harvard Health Publications Web site (www.health.harvard.edu).

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Setting guidelines for healthy BMIs has traditionally been done by exam­ining death rates in large groups of people and then picking those BMIs with the lowest death rates as the "healthy range." This usually gives a U-shaped curve with increasing death rates on either side of some minimum. These curves imply that weighing too little is just as unhealthy as weighing too much.

There's certainly no argument about the too-much-weight side. Countless studies, one of which includes more than a million adults, have shown that BMIs above 25 increase the risk of dying early, mainly from heart disease and cancer. There is widespread agreement that BMIs from 25 up to 30 should be considered overweight and over 30 obese. It's the too-little-weight side of the curve, however, that has caused confusion.  Can a person be too thin?