If you want to know if you are overweight or at a healthy weight, you can calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index – formula: kg/m²). Calculate it below with the most extensive BMI calculator in the Netherlands.
Your BMI result
Your BMI:
You are underweight and therefore too light. Because of this you have too few reserves in case of illness. Start gaining weight as quickly as possible to improve your health. You have a healthy weight so you are right where you are now. Bear in mind that BMI is only an indication of your health. You are overweight. This gives you a greater chance of certain serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Start losing weight as quickly as possible to improve your health. You are heavily overweight (obese) and are therefore way too heavy. This gives you a greater chance of certain serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Start losing weight as quickly as possible to improve your health. You are heavily overweight (morbidly obese) and are therefore way too heavy. This gives you a greater chance of certain serious diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Start losing weight as quickly as possible to improve your health.
A healthy weight lies between a BMI of and . See below how many pounds you have to lose to get into this category.
Disclaimer: BMI gives a distorted picture at the age of 70 or older. Research shows that the risk of death at the age of 70 is lowest in the "overweight" category and not in the "normal weight" category. (source).
How many years of life you can lose with this BMI
Result: year
The calculation is based on the data from a recent scientific article in which 7,414 people were followed for a long time (source). The data for the age group of 30 years has been used for you. Because you are younger than 30 years old, you could lose even more life years than is currently estimated. The data of the age group of 50 years has been used for you. The data of the age group of 70 years has been used for you. Because you are older than 70, you probably lose fewer years of life then estimated here. For you, the data of the age groups of 30 and 50 years is cleverly combined. For you, the data of the age groups of 50 and 70 years is cleverly combined.
You may be wondering: am I losing now year? The answer is: you can not know that. We do know that on average this is the case for people who do not smoke with a comparable age and a comparable BMI.
Note: with this estimate, we assume that your BMI doesn't change. So you can still do something about it!
Number of pounds to lose
Here you can find the maximum weight you need to lose for a healthy weight without annoying and dangerous health risks
Your ideal weight
With your height you have a healthy weight between and pounds. Below you will find exactly where you stand based on the BMI calculations.
Now you can do three other things:
- Specify your goal (losing weight, for example) so I can tell you how many calories you can eat daily.
- Calculate your waist-to-height ratio. This is a much more reliable indicator than the BMI (just like the waist circumference and the waist-to-hip ratio) and it is by far the best predictor for the risk of cardiovascular diseases, premature death, overweight and type 2 diabetes (source, source, source)
- Have a look at the observations concerning the BMI calculator.
Your daily calorie intake
Result: kcal
This is an estimate of how many calories you need daily to keep on weight. This is based on the formula.
However, according to your BMI calculation you are underweight. To reduce the chance of health problems you should at least kg must gain. Your ideal weight is kg, for that you would kg must gain.
This is an estimate of what you would need to consume daily in order to lose weight with a calorie restriction of 25% per day. The calorie consumption is based on the formula.
According to your BMI calculation you have a healthy weight. Note that you are no more than kg lose, because then you would be underweight. Your ideal weight is kg.
This is an estimate of calories you would need to take in daily to keep on weight. But because you are underweight, it is advised to consume more than this to achieve a healthy weight.
Note: You indicate that you don’t do much exercise. To promote weight loss it can help to be more active.
However, according to your BMI calculation you are overweight. To reduce the chance of health problems you should at least kg have to lose weight. Your ideal weight is kg, for that you would kg must be lost.
This is an estimate of what you should consume in calories daily to live healthier and longer with a calorie restriction of 25% per day. The calorie consumption is based on the formula.
According to your BMI calculation you have a healthy weight. Please note that due to the calorie restriction you do not exceed kg lose, because then you would be underweight. Your ideal weight is kg.
This is an estimate of how many calories you need daily to keep on weight. This is based on the formula.
According to your BMI calculation you are underweight. Note that you are no more than kg lose, because then you would be underweight. Your ideal weight is kg.
Note: you indicate that you don’t do much exercise. An active lifestyle contributes greatly to healthy aging.
This is an estimate of calories you would need daily to build muscle. The calorie consumption is based on the formula.
Note: you indicate that you don’t do much exercise. To build muscle mass you will have to do the right exercises.
You can calculate your waist-to-height ratio (WtHR) below. The WtHR is a much more reliable indicator than the BMI (just like the waist circumference and the waist-to-hip ratio) and it is by far the best predictor for the risk of cardiovascular diseases, premature death, overweight and type 2 diabetes (source, source, source)
Note: you must first calculate your BMI above if you want to calculate your waist-to-height ratio.
Your WHtR result
Your waist-to-height ratio:
Unfortunately it is for children younger than year not possible to indicate whether the result is healthy or unhealthy. Do you want to know if this is the case based on your BMI calculation? Then click here.
Please note, you could be underweight. Do you want to know if this is the case based on your BMI calculation? Then click here. You have a healthy WHtR so you are good right where you are now. Bear in mind that WHtR is only an indication of your health, so that you don’t necessarily have to be healthy. Your WHtR is unhealthy. This gives you a greater chance of premature death and serious illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Start losing weight as quickly as possible to improve your health. Your WHtR is very unhealthy. This gives you a greater chance of premature death and serious illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Start losing weight as quickly as possible to improve your health.
For you, a healthy WHtR lies between and . To determine this, we used the data from a recent scientific article (source). Do you like a short explanation about this research? Then click here. (source). Do you like a short explanation about this research? Then click here.
See below how many cm of waist you have to lose to bring yourself back to a healthy level.
Centimeters to lose from your waist
Here you will find what you need to lose minimum and maximum in centimeters of waist for a healthy waist-to-height ratio
Your ideal waist
With your height you have a healthy waist between and cm. Below you will find exactly where you are based on the WHtR calculations.
Observations concerning the BMI calculator
- I advise you to use the updated BMI formula, more accurate.
- If you have a very high BMI, you can see the corresponding number of years of life lost on average (according to research).
- For children, we use the World Health Organisation’s BMI-for-age reference (even per month!)
- For children under 2, the BMI makes no sense because this data is too variable.
- For children from 2 to 20, we use the WHO’s growth references and BMI cut-offs (source). My calculator lets you indicate your birth month for more accurate results. This does not affect the BMI itself, but it does affect the reference values.
- There are several criticisms of the standard BMI. The updated BMI formula is better because it does not assume that people always grow proportionally in height and weight as they age.
- At 70 or later, the standard BMI gives a distorted picture. Indeed, research has shown that mortality rates at the age of 70 are the lowest in the “overweight” category, not in the “normal weight” category (source). Additional studies will have to show whether this is already taking place a few years earlier.
What is the BMI + more background information
Do you want to know what BMI means? In the article below, I will tell you more about the BMI formula and explain why the BMI can be misleading when it comes to healthy weight.
Among other things, you will learn:
- What is the BMI
- Why the Body Mass Index is not a reliable indicator
- The 5 main criticisms of the BMI calculation
- The best alternative methods for assessing your state of health
- And much, much more…
Table of content
How to calculate your BMI?
The BMI (Body Mass Index) calculation formula is weight (in kilograms) divided by height (in meters) squared. Example: 65kg /1.70m² = 22.5 (healthy!). Unfortunately, the BMI is an old and partly outdated concept. Better use the improved BMI formula or the more accurate waist-to-height ratio (WtHR).
BMI formula
Although the BMI formula is not a perfect system, the BMI is still widely used in the medical world. The BMI is used by the US government and the World Health Organisation (WHO), among others, for determining what is a healthy weight.
Do you want to calculate your BMI? First of all, make sure you know your current height and weight.
Let me explain the BMI formula one more time with a clear example:
Karen is a middle-aged woman. She is 1.70m tall and weighs 80 kilograms. To calculate her BMI value, Karen will first have to multiply her height by itself. Since she’s 1.70m tall, she must multiply 1.70 by 1.70 which gives her 2.89.
The BMI formula is the following:
80 / (1.7 x 1.7) = 27.6. Therefore, Karen’s BMI is 27.6.
As you can see, calculating your BMI is very simple. You don’t have to be a mathematician for that.
Read on and find out if Karen has a healthy weight according to the BMI formula.
What is a healthy BMI? BMI table
You can interpret the result of the BMI calculation based on a table, which should show whether you are underweight, overweight, obese or at a healthy weight.
Below is a brief overview of the different BMI categories:
BMI
Interpretation
Health risk
< 18.5
Underweight
Underweight, not enough fat stores
18.5 – 24.9
Normal weight
Excellent, keep it up!
25.0 – 29.9
Overweight
You’re advised to slim down to a healthy weight
30.0 – 39.9
Obesity
Very high risk of developing diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases, infertility (in women) and joint pain.
> 40
Morbid obesity
You must lose weight urgently; your health is in great danger!
Let’s compare the above values with Karen’s BMI.
- As we know, Karen has a BMI of 27.6 which, according to the BMI table, means she is overweight.
Karen is advised to lose weight until she reaches a healthy weight.
Based on your height and body weight you can see which BMI category you fall into in the picture below :
The history behind the BMI
The BMI formula is older than you may think. We owe the concept of the Body Mass Index to Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and mathematician, one of the first to use statistics in social sciences.
It was Adolphe Quetelet’s interest in human physical characteristics in population groups that eventually led to the BMI index.
I must stress, however, that Quetelet was not interested in studying obesity. He was mostly interested in social statistics and in portraying the “average man”. He used his index to study the development of healthy people.
In the period following the Second World War, the body weight of the average American increased rapidly. People looked for ways of monitoring the average relative weight and the Quetelet index was recognised as a practical indicator.
The name later changed to Body Mass Index (BMI) and the BMI calculation was used as a tool to determine the level of overweight quickly and easily.
5 criticisms of the BMI
The BMI gives an indication of your health. In particular, underweight is a predictor of high risk of premature death (source).
However, there are increasing objections from the medical world to using the BMI formula when it comes to determining overweight. The BMI raises diverse issues.
Let me explain these through a few examples :
nº1: Average height
The BMI is fine for people of average height, but it doesn’t work well for short people nor for tall people. Short individuals get a higher appreciation of their BMI than would be necessary, and tall people get a lower appreciation.
As a consequence, shorter people often diet unnecessarily, and tall people use their low BMI as a proof that their unhealthy and fattening lifestyle is not so bad after all.
nº2: Old age
The BMI is also misleading for the elderly because people get shorter as they age. Thus some people who initially had a healthy weight can suddenly find themselves in the overweight category.
nº3: Children
The same applies to growing children; measurement values in children are subject to continuous change, and the BMI fails to take any growth spurts (whether in height or breadth) into account.
nº4: Pregnant and breast-feeding women
I also advise against calculating your BMI if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.
As a pregnant woman, it makes little sense to calculate your BMI, because your body weight will naturally increase every month.
The BMI index would give you a completely wrong idea, when in fact the child is growing healthily in the womb.
nº5: Muscle mass
The BMI index is also extremely unreliable if you have a lot of muscle mass. As an example, let’s take a man who’s 1.90 meter tall and who weighs 95 kilos.
If you calculate his BMI using the standard formula, you’ll get a BMI of 26.3. This would mean, according to the table above, that this gentleman is slightly overweight.
But what if I told you that that same man is 23 years old, regularly does strength training and has a fat percentage of 14%? Then we get a completely different picture!
14% is well within the healthy fat percentage range. From this perspective, this man is not overweight at all.
The ratio between fat tissue and muscle mass is not included in the BMI calculation, which means the formula gives a distorted and unreliable picture.
On average, people who work out have more muscle mass than people who don’t go the gym. Muscle mass weighs more than body fat. Strength training make you burn fat and build muscle.
Since the Body Mass Index does not take into account the fat percentage, this man seems to be slightly overweight. In fact, he is really healthy and does not have any excess body fat or overweight.
In that respect, the fat percentage is a much better indication of whether you are at a healthy weight or not.
The old BMI is unreliable
All of these points show fairly clearly that the BMI is not reliable as an indication of overweight.
Since I don’t know what your fat percentage is, I can’t tell if you have a healthy weight.
It would therefore be much better to include your fat percentage, muscle mass and abdominal circumference in the calculation. Fortunately, improved versions of the BMI have been developed.
What’s the new BMI formula?
In 2013, a professor at the University of Oxford developed an improved version of the old BMI because he wanted to provide a more reliable indicator.
His reasoning was that the old BMI would work fine if people always grew proportionally in height and weight as they get older. But unfortunately, that is not the case. Hence he has slightly modified the old formula in order to achieve a more realistic picture.
It’s also worth noting that the BMI was made simple because in the 1840’s there were no calculators and people wrote everything on paper (source).
With this new BMI formula, you have to multiply the body weight by 1.3.
The new BMI formula looks like this:
Improved BMI Index = Your weight X 1.3 divided by your height in centimetres to the power 2.5
In our previous example of the man who weighs 95 kg and is 190 cm tall, the old BMI indicates 26.3. Slightly overweight.
According to the improved BMI formula, this man has a healthy weight, with a BMI of 24.8.
Unfortunately, this improved BMI is not official and is not used by many public authorities.
In any case, it is better able to show whether you have a healthy weight or not.
Waist-to-height ratio (WHtR)
Research has shown that the Waist-to-Height Ratio (WtHR) is a more reliable reflection of someone’s current state of health than the BMI (source, source, source, source). The waist-to-height ratio looks at the relationship between height and waist circumference.
The same studies shows that WtHR is a superior indicator compared to the waist circumference and the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). Indeed, the WtHR proves the best predictor for the risk of heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and premature death (source, source, source).
Most of the dangerous body fat is stored in the abdomen, and individuals with a fat belly are the most likely to have problems.
- It is abdominal fat (internal fat, also called visceral fat) that is unhealthy, not necessarily your body weight.
Visceral fat is the fat that accumulates around the organs. It is very dangerous and unhealthy and requires immediate action.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that slim people don’t have visceral fat, but the chances are a lot smaller. You can be unhealthy even if you’re thin.
The formula to calculate your WtHR is quite simple:
Waist-to-height ratio = your waist circumference in centimetres divided by your height in centimetres.
For those of you who find this difficult, here is a calculator that will do the math for you.
A WtHR of 0.5 is the global reference value for a poor state of health (source).
Reaching your ideal weight
In this article, I have given you several measurement methods to check if you’re overweight.
“Oscar, it turns out that I’m overweight…now what?’
If you are honest with yourself, you can determine whether you are overweight or not simply by standing in front of the mirror and looking critically at yourself.
Now that you know that you’re a little overweight, it’s time to address the cause. We are often so used to our bad habits that we don’t even realise that we have an unhealthy lifestyle.
It is now primarily a matter of getting back to a healthy weight, so as to keep your chances of developing conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases to a minimum.
Weight loss = a healthy lifestyle, a healthy and varied diet and a lot of exercise.
Have you ever thought about how many calories you have to burn if you want to lose one kilo of body fat?
Most people think that, to lose weight, you need to eat less. But that’s an erroneous approach.
Of course you have to consume less calories: there’s a reason why you have put on weight. But make sure that the calories you consume come from a healthy and varied diet.
You want to lose weight and reach your target weight in a healthy way. Otherwise, you won’t last long. You will find efficient diet tips to lose weight and get rid of your belly fat once and for all here.
Looking for exercises to get a flat belly? Then read this article.
To conclude
Don’t make losing weight a big deal. Of course it’s important that you lose some weight, but make sure it doesn’t take over your life. This will do nothing but cause unnecessary stress and get in the way of your weight loss.
The important thing is that you know what you are doing, that you eat healthy and that you work out.
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