Women's health bmi calculator for free#

BMI calculations and charts don’t adjust for your gender, age, race, ethnicity and other factors, which can impact your body fat and muscle-and therefore skew your BMI higher or lower. While your BMI can give you an indication as to whether you’re at a healthy weight for your height, it’s far from perfect. However, having a BMI that’s too low poses other health problems, such as malnutrition and low bone density. While BMI doesn’t directly measure body fat, per se, it can give you and your healthcare provider an indication of whether you carry excess body fat, which in turn puts you at greater risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and some cancers. Quetelet developed the height-to-weight equation as a way to help determine an ideal weight for populations in general, not necessarily for individuals.īut because BMI is an accessible-albeit impercise-tool, it’s been adopted by the healthcare community and scientific researchers as a way of indicating the relative amount of body fat on a person’s body frame, and assessing if a person is at a healthy weight for their height. Other factors to consider include your age, gender, weight distribution, family medical history and lifestyle.Īdolphe Quetelet, a mathematician, first developed BMI and named it decades ago-it was first cited in 1972 in the Journal of Chronic Diseases.

“It’s a base assessment,” says Jamie Feit, a registered dietitian at, which offers at-home and lab testing information and resources. That’s why BMI alone should not be the only factor considered when gauging if you’re at a healthy weight. While it’s designed to estimate whether you have excess or inadequate body fat, it does not measure fat directly-therefore it does not provide the whole picture for some people. BMI Chart For Men And Women: Your Guide To This Common Health MetricīMI is a tool that helps determine whether you’re at a healthy weight in relation to your height-but “tool” is the operative word. While we work hard to provide accurate and up-to-date information that we think you will find relevant, Forbes Health does not and cannot guarantee that any information provided is complete and makes no representations or warranties in connection thereto, nor to the accuracy or applicability thereof. The compensation we receive from advertisers does not influence the recommendations or advice our editorial team provides in our articles or otherwise impact any of the editorial content on Forbes Health. Second, we also include links to advertisers’ offers in some of our articles these “affiliate links” may generate income for our site when you click on them. This site does not include all companies or products available within the market. The compensation we receive for those placements affects how and where advertisers’ offers appear on the site. First, we provide paid placements to advertisers to present their offers.

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Women's health bmi calculator for free#

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