Find your ideal body weight

Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight can help you lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels and reduce risks for health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

But the question is, what is a “healthy weight” for you?

Before anything else, let’s get one thing straight: Almost all “ideal body weight”  websites on the Internet use obsolete formulas created in the 1970s or earlier. 

You’ll find plenty of sites that help you determine your ideal weight based on Body Mass Index (BMI) — a measure of weight proportionate to height. But BMI does not take into account many important factors such as your age, muscle-to-fat ratio, waist-to-hip ratio, sex or bone density.

For example, some muscular people, include professional athletes who are clearly in top physical condition, may have a BMI that puts them in the overweight range as muscle weighs more than fat.

So using these outdated charts can make you feel as though you are more overweight than you actually are, and set you up for unrealistic expectations about how much you can or should lose.

With that in mind, this article from Medical News Today explains four of the most common methods for calculating your “ideal” body weight. While none of these measures is perfect, using an average of the four calculations can be helpful in providing you with some basic guidelines about what’s a good weight for you.