Aim
for the Healthy Weight
Explanation
The current Aim for a Healthy Weight graph (poster) produced by Nutrition Australia has been developed using WHO and NHMRC approved data as follows:
| Underweight |
BMI 18.49 and below |
| Normal range |
BMI 18.50 – 24.9 |
| Overweight |
BMI 25.00 –29.9 |
| Moderate Obesity |
BMI 30.00 –34.9 |
| Severe Obesity |
BMI 35.0 – 39.9 |
| Very Severe Obesity |
BMI > 40.00 |
The WHO agreed that BMI be defined as:
weight (in kg) divided by the square of one’s height (in m)
i.e. kg/m2.
The following is from Clinical Practice Guidelines for the management of overweight and obesity 2003.
Pages 44-45. For more details view the full document on the Department of Healthy and Ageing website:
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/Publishing.nsf/Content/obesityguidelines-index.htm
BMI is highly, but not perfectly, correlated with fat mass. The measure does however, have several limitations:
1 It does not distinguish fat mass from lean mass. This means that body fat calculated using BMI can be underestimated in older subjects, because of their differential loss of lean mass and decreased height and overestimated in subjects with muscular build, such as athletes.
2 BMI does not necessarily reflect body fat distribution. A measure of fat distribution is important in assessing overweight and obesity because abdominal fat is a potential risk factor for disease, independent of total body fat. There is a gender difference here ~ men have on average twice the amount of abdominal fat than pre-menopausal women. There is also a difference in ethnic groups. For example Asians and Indians have a more centralised distribution of body fat for a given level of BMI compared to people of European descent ~ hence morbidity and mortality occur at a lower BMI in thee groups.
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