Discover the Keys to Managing Your Health
Acute and Chronic illnesses and injury can adversely affect your physical, emotional, relational and spiritual well being. Taking control over your life is vital to gaining well being and living life to the fullest. With good preventive care, early intervention, and the many treatment options available, management of many illnesses can be successful and provide individuals with a quality of life that allows for continued living with dignity
Obesity. At their most basic, the words “overweight” and “obesity” are ways to describe having too much body fat.
The most commonly used measure of weight status today is the body mass index, or BMI. BMI uses a simple calculation based on the ratio of someone’s height and weight (BMI = kg/m2). Decades of research have shown that BMI provides a good estimate of “fatness” and also correlates well with important health outcomes like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and overall mortality. So it’s a useful tool for clinicians trying to screen to determine who may be at risk because of carrying around too much weight for their height.
Healthy BMI Ranges for Adults and Children
What’s considered a healthy BMI? For adult men and women, a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9. Overweight is defined as a BMI between 25.0 and 29.9; and obesity, a BMI of 30 or higher.
As in adults, obesity is also a growing problem in children and adolescents. Because children grow at different rates, depending on their age and gender, the definitions of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents differ from those in adults. In the U.S., for example, the definition is based on standard growth charts developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In children and adolescents age 2 to 20 years old, a BMI in the 85th to 94th percentiles for age and gender is consider overweight; a BMI in the 95th percentile or higher is considered obese. Internationally, the World Health Organization and the International Obesity Task Force have also developed definitions of childhood overweight and obesity.
Retrieved from the Harvard School of Public Health: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-definition/