This entire post courtesy of Number Freaking, which is a fun book involving statistics. Seriously, if you hate math but like weird facts, this book is INTERESTING! **I hate math, but this book rocks.**The average American is now overweight.
By just how much is defined by a measure called body mass index (BMI). The “healthy” range for BMI is between 18.9 and 24.9. A higher or lower figure more or less means you are over or under weight. A figure over 30 means you are obese. You can calculate your own BMI using this formula: your weight in pounds (multiplied by 703) divided by your height in inches multiplied by your height in inches.
In the US, the average adult man is 5 feet 9.1 inches (69.1 inches) tall and weighs 180 pounds. He therefore has a BMI of 25.8. The average adult American woman, meanwhile, is 5 feet 3.7 inches (63.7) tall and weighs 152 pounds. She therefore has a BMI of 26.3.
The maximum healthy weight for a man 69.1 inches tall (i.e. the weight which gives him a BMI of 24.9) is 169 pounds.
Likewise, the healthy weight for a woman 63.7 inches tall is about 144 pounds.
The average American man is about 11 pounds overweight and the average adult American woman 8 pounds overweight. There are 114.2 million American men aged 15+ and 120.7 million American women. We’ll assume they’re all adults.
• More boys than girls are born in the US, but more women survive past 40.
There are therefore 628,100 excess tons of prime American men and 482,800 excess tons of AAA American womanhood. Well over a million tons in total.
By converting this excess man-weight into new men of 169 pounds and ditto this excess fem-weight into new women of 144 pounds, then combining the totals, we could build 14.13 million new Americans.
This is equivalent to twice the population of Virginia. The population of Florida is 15.98 million and the population of Illinois is 12.42 million.
A few other statistics:
• In 1750, an average Englishman weighed 130 pounds, and an average Frenchman weighed 110 pounds
• In 1750, an average Englishman was 4 feet 7 inches tall, so on average Englishmen have grown an inch about every 18.3 years.
From the Sergeants:
Figure your BMI. Can you contribute to the building of an entirely new person? The range for a healthy BMI IS attainable. If nothing else, getting you closer to a healthy BMI is more important than reaching your eventual target weight. Health first, the rest comes later.
5 Comments:
I thought one of the coolest things I found out in WW is how my BMI dropped. It went from 35+ to around 23.4 at my lowest weight. I'm hovering at 25.5-26 now...grrr.
FYI, there are lots of BMI calculators on the web - just google it, you'll see what I mean!
"your weight in pounds (multiplied by 703) divided by your height in inches multiplied by your height in inches."
This doesn't work for me....I'm not sure where I'm messing it up. Doesn't dividing and multiplying by the same number give you 1? Oh, nevermind. I'll just go find one on the web that does it for me. LOL
Mine is 24.7. At my target weight, it will be 20.7.
There are many doctors and dietitians out there who refuse to use BMI because it doesn't factor in muscle mass, bone mass, body fat percentage, ethnicity, body type, or even gender which effects body density. I personally don't use it because it was created to categorize broad segments of the population by their body mass in well...an index. It became controversial when some Doctors started using it to diagnose individual patients, which it was never meant for. So, use BMI with a grain of salt and not as the end all be all of your weight loss goals.
If you use the BMI, one of the most successful body builders ever, Vince Taylor has a BMI of 34. Which falls into the obese category.
There are arguments and debates for every single aspect of diet and exercise.
This post was statistical in nature. As is the BMI in the first place, a statistic.
"The BMI has become controversial because many people, including physicians, have come to rely on it for medical diagnosis - but that has never been the BMI's purpose. It is meant to be used as a simple means of classifying sedentary (physically inactive) individuals with an average body composition."
Also, "The BMI is meant to broadly categorise populations for purely statistical purposes. As noted, its accuracy in relation to actual levels of body fat is easily distorted by such factors as fitness level, muscle mass, bone structure, gender, and ethnicity. People who are mesomorphic tend to have higher BMI numbers than people who are endomorphic, because they have greater bone mass and greater muscle mass, respectively, than do endomorphic individuals."
This explanation resolves your point regarding the body builder.
BMI is not an absolute, but for at least one of our Pool members, figuring their BMI was a harsh slap in the face that they needed.
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