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Know all about Body Mass Index (BMI). (Part-1)

The concept of Body Mass Index (BMI) is very simple. A ratio of your height and weight are used to calculate your BMI. It came out as an invaluable tool for identifying and tracking population trends in weight.
People also try to relate it with the measure of body fat and as a way to help define overweightness and obesity. While it as an indicator of body fatness, it is not the best tool to tell about the body fat. BMI has many limitations in the assessment of the individual as it does not take into account the distribution of body fat.
We will learn about BMI origin, calculations, limitations and how we can use BMI to maintain a good health.


What is Body Mass Index (BMI)?

It's short for Body Mass Index.  For an individual person, it's defined as that person's mass in kg divided by the square of their height in meters.

              BMI=mass / height2

You can also use other units of measurement, but the above ratio needs to be scaled.  For example, if you measure mass in pounds and height in inches, that ratio has to be multiplied by 703.

 You can calculate your BMI here.

How is it used?

It categorizes people as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese:

         Underweight                  BMI < 18.5
         Normal                18.5 < BMI < 25
         Overweight            25 < BMI < 30
         Obese                     30 < BMI

You can read the category from this images given below:

BMI categories
Image Source

bmi chart
You can calculate your BMI here.


How BMI came into the medical books?

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). He was an early statistician who was interested in using statistics to answer questions in social and biological science.  Among other things, he wanted a way of using statistics to determine how weight depends on height. He concluded, "weight increases as the square of the height" among adults.  The ratio, weight divided by height squared, varies for individuals according to an approximately normal distribution. The standard deviations away from the mean gives a measure of how far an individual is from the average.


Ancel Keys (1904–2004) confirmed Quetelet's results and named this ratio the Body Mass Index.  He then went on to recommend its use for further studies related to health.  It has been, and you can see one of those in the categorization of people as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese.

 Read more about BMI limitations and how good it is in indicating the body fatness in Know all about Body Mass Index (BMI) (Part-2).
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