Body Mass Index is a big thing amongst health-crazed people, and employers who are bent on not giving you a raise or promotion etc. Basically it tells you if you are overweight or not by simply calculating the ratio of your height^2 versus weight.
Is that an accurate way to say whether one is underweight or overweight/obese? Muscle mass is heavier than fat. If you are big, and muscular, heart rate of 60bpm, and you can run 10km non-stop in one go, but with a body that looks like Sammo Hung, then immediately your BMI will shoot over 30...and that will tell people that you're already extremely overweight. But if you are as slim as Bijan, but have more fat than muscle mass, you'll probably get a BMI of 19.
BMI was an easy way, cooked up by insurance companies in the US, so that they get to charge people with higher BMI, higher premiums. But people all over the world quickly took this method as the simplest way to say whether one is fit or not. A more accurate way to say whether one is fat or not is by doing fitness tests like the PULHEEMS that the military has adopted from the British Army system and body fat measurement. But to do that means spending more time, which the insurance companies cannot afford to waste.
It would be good to have a lean looking body. But I think that BMI is quite inaccurate, and that fitness test and body fat measurement is a better way to way whether one is fit or fat.
What do you think, docs and forumers?
