When it comes to losing weight, the sheer number of options you have can make progress hard to come by. If you are someone who wishes to take better care of their body, though, it makes sense to learn about your Body Mass Index (BMI). This important metric has become a key part of learning how to lose weight. Why, though?
What makes your BMI such a useful tool for making sure you can begin to cut back on your weight gain?
Is it really such a useful metric for improvement?
What is your BMI?
Without being too technical, your BMI is the calculation of your weight combined with your height. It delivers a good starting point for seeing how healthy your weight is in relation to your height. Taller people, naturally, can carry more weight as they have more to them. Smaller people will find that weight gain into unhealthy regions is often easier due to that fact.
BMI stats often range from around 18.5 (underweight) to 40+ (heavily obese). Typically, anything from around 18.5-25 is seen as a healthy starting point. While everything from body shape and personal health to your profession can change what is a ‘good’ BMI, typically you wish to stay in that region of 18.5-25.
However, keep in mind that an underweight BMI is just as bad as an overweight BMI. Being underweight has huge implications for your health in terms of physical strength and staying point. Don’t just presume that the lower the better. If you want to find what is just right for you in terms of a BMI rating, you should look to evaluate your lifestyle versus your height and weight.
Then, you can use a BMI calculator to determine your present condition.
Why can BMI be used in weight loss?
There are numerous reasons why it is a valuable weight loss tool, including:
- BMI provides you with a better metric than mere weight alone. What sounds like a good weight or looks a healthy weight to you could be entirely out of keeping with your physical condition and lifestyle.
- Also, many people find that using their BMI is easier to follow along with. Rather than seeing the fluctuations that you might with regards to weight, BMI offers you a greater chance to see progress. Seeing physical progress can often be hard; BMI shows you the physical results of your progress and hard work.
- Put simply, BMI is an excellent barometer of the risk that your body is under with regards to health problems. If you are overweight in terms of your ideal BMI, you risk everything from joint issues to high blood pressure and diabetes. With your BMI calculation, you can know how close you are to being over or underweight – or just right.
- This leaves you with a greater idea of what has to change in your personal and professional life to ensure you see continuous growth. The more you see your BMI move into that happy medium range, the closer you are to finding a physical regimen that works for you.
Things to consider when using BMI for weight loss analysis
However, it’s important to remember that BMI is a wide-reaching scale. It’s not a direct measurement of your body fat – but more importantly, it’s not telling you where the fat is stored. As such, someone who is muscle-bound might find that they are closer to the obese category than they expect: BMI does not discriminate against muscle or fat.
That being said, BMI does provide you with a better target if you just want to lose weight. Basically, unless you are looking to build muscle, you can often see that a lower BMI means that you are reducing your chances of being unhealthy. So long as you pay specific attention to the excess fat around your gut – the most dangerous form of fat, known as visceral fat – you can use your BMI to really help amplify your weight loss requirements.
By combining BMI analysis with day-to-day lifestyle changes, though, you can find this offers you a very good starting point for knowing just how effective your weight loss efforts are.
So, with that in mind, you should be able to both see that BMI is a useful weight loss analysis tool but it’s not the be-all and end-all. For those who find it hard to see progress in kilograms and stones, though, BMI offers a great starting point for seeing genuine progress – fueling motivation for even more weight loss.
