Having a healthy weight is essential to preserving your health and preventing various diseases. But how can we know exactly what our ideal weight is? Answers to all your questions in this article
Obesity and overweight are very common problems these days. Touching children, adults and seniors, they are considered the scourges of the century and have been associated with many dangerous pathologies such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes as well as cardiovascular diseases. Having said that, having an ideal healthy weight is important to guard against these health problems. But what exactly is an ideal weight?
Ideal weight is above all a weight where the person feels comfortable, but must still respect certain criteria such as morphology, age, height or even gender.
There are a variety of calculation methods that attempt to determine the perfect weight for each person. Some of them are very simple and others much more complicated to understand or to realize. Obviously, they do not all have the same principle, for if some of them are based on one or two of the above criteria, others take all of them into consideration.
How to know your ideal weight?
Here are 4 different methods to calculate your ideal weight:
Age considerations:
With age, it is normal to take a little more weight. If it is a natural process of development in children and adolescents, in adults, this may be due to hormones.
There is also a striking difference between body composition in both gnders. In general, men have more muscle mass, heavier bones with less fat, unlike women. This difference also changes with age and impacts weight!
To help you determine your ideal weight, depending on your age, but also your height, here is an explanatory table:
The Broca method:
Broca's method is undoubtedly the simplest but also the most rudimentary formula for calculating the ideal weight. It is based on only one criterion to find the perfect weight, that of the size, and does not take into account any other element such as age, morphology or even gender.
How it works ? Just take your size in cm and subtract 100 and that's the weight you need! For example, a person of a height of 1.65 m should have a weight of 65 kg.
However, this equation is not always fair, because for large women (1.75 m), the ideal weight may be too high (75 kg).
The Creff method:
The Creff method is considered the most sophisticated formula compared to the others. It therefore corrects existing methods by considering morphology, age and size. However, it does not include gender!
To calculate its ideal weight using the Creff's formula, you will have to choose between different calculations, according to your morphology (fine, normal or wide). The only problem with this method is that it is not always accurate, because it may be difficult for some people to assess their morphology. Subjectivity will be there!
Here's how to calculate your ideal weight using the Creff formula:
Normal morphology:
[(Size in cm - 100) + (age / 10)] * 0.9
Fine Morphology:
[(Size in cm - 100) + (age / 10)] * 0.9 ²
Large Morphology:
[(Size in cm - 100) + (age / 10)] * 0.9 * 1.1
The Body Mass Index (BMI):
The body mass index allows you to know in which range of silhouette you are. It is a calculation approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) which takes into account the size and weight and which gives a more reliable indicator than the kilos, in order to determine your corpulence.
But before being an indicator to know its corpulence, this index helps rather avoid the risks associated with leanness, overweight as well as obesity. Indeed, the weight alone is not sufficient to determine one of the above-mentioned cases, because weighing 80 kilos when we make 1,80m is not the same thing as when we do 1,60m.
BMI is therefore a reliable method for people between the ages of 18 and 65 but is not valid for athletes, seniors and pregnant and lactating women.
The BMI can be calculated by dividing the weight in kg by the squared size. Here's how to interpret your BMI body mass index result:
- Less than 16.5: undernutrition
- Between 16.5 and 18: thinness
- Between 18, 5 and 25: normal
- Between 25 and 30: Overweight
- Between 30 and 35: Moderate Obesity
- More than 40: massive obesity
