BMI Trivia
amy March 10th, 2007
Your Body Mass Index (BMI) is broken out into 4 catetories: less than 18 is “underweight,” 18 - 25 is “healthy,” 25 - 30 is “overweight,” 30 - 40 is “obese,” and greater than 40 is “morbidly obese” (they couldn’t have found a better name for the last category?) Every dieter knows these categories by heart and counts down the pounds until they are no longer “overweight.”
But, did you know that just 10 years earlier that would have been a much higher number? According to Wikipedia:
In 1998, the U.S. National Institutes of Health brought U.S. definitions into line with World Health Organization guidelines, lowering the normal/overweight cut-off from BMI 27.8 to BMI 25. This had the effect of redefining approximately 30 million Americans, previously “technically healthy” to “technically overweight”.
In 1997, my healthy weight would be 194 or less instead of 174.
