Figuring Out the State of Your Weight
In This Chapter
� Comprehending calories and your metabolism
� Looking at your dieting past
� Determining your next dieting move
� Taking measures to get to a healthy weight
The health and fitness business is booming, and more information about diet and nutrition is available than ever before. However, government statistics show that at least 30 percent, or almost one-third, of American adults are overweight. Translated to real numbers, approximately 60 million people in this country may improve their health prospects if they lose some of their excess weight. And that figure doesn’t include the one out of five American children who are also carrying around more fat than medical experts believe is healthy.
Assessing your current weight situation and figuring out how you arrived in this state of being overweight are important first steps toward permanent weight control. This chapter can help you uncover this information as well as provide many helpful charts and formulas for figuring out just how far you are from your healthiest weight.
This chapter also contains plenty of food for thought to help you examine your weight history and understand its relevance to your current weight-loss goals. This information is necessary for success because you have to know where you are now before you can figure out where you’re going next. And you also need to know how you arrived at the weight you are now, so that it doesn’t happen again!
Ups and Downs: Discovering How People Gain and Lose Weight
Everyone who struggles with weight control knows at least one person who appears to eat truckloads of food but never gains a pound. It’s maddening, isn’t it — especially when that other person eats so much of your favorite junk food! Pinpointing the exact reasons why one person gains weight at the mere sight of a doughnut while another person can freely indulge is difficult, but the personal food choices you make and exercise habits you practice on a regular basis greatly impact it. Furthermore, you may not know enough about someone else’s habits to judge. But differences in the less obvious, and less controllable, metabolism, basically how the body uses food to create energy, also greatly affect how a person loses or gains weight.
In the following sections, I define metabolism, describe its relationship to calories, and explain why some people gain (and lose) weight more easily than others.
Understanding the basics: Metabolism 101
Your metabolism is the sum total of all the chemical reactions and changes that are constantly going on in your body. These processes include fat produc- tion, protein breakdown, toxin removal, and the general growth, replacement, and repair of body cells that’s necessary for overall good health. Concerning weight control, however, the focus is on energy metabolism, the process by which your body breaks down nutrients from food and converts them into energy.
Energy metabolism begins as soon as your body digests food and breaks it down into its respective nutrients. Your body can use three different nutrients for energy: carbohydrates, fats, and protein. (Alcohol also supplies energy, but because it contains no nutrients and can potentially damage your health, it’s not considered a good source.) Together, carbohydrates, fats, and protein are known as macronutrients. (Check out Chapter 3 for more about these and other nutrients.) Your body metabolizes each of these macronutrients differently from the rest.
� Carbohydrates make energy.
� Proteins renew body cells in muscle, skin, and other organs, and pro- duce energy if no carbohydrates are available.
� Fats make energy, or if not used, your body stores them directly as body fat.
In general, your metabolism works the same way as everyone else’s, but the rate at which you metabolize nutrients is unique to you. How your body uses the food you eat to create energy, and how the different foods you eat affect your weight and your overall health, is a very individual matter. If you have a fast metabolic rate, you’re able to burn calories more efficiently than some- one with a slower metabolic rate. Many factors — age, gender, hormones, body composition, body temperature, and your current state of health — affect energy metabolism and help determine how effectively your body uses food to generate energy.
Identifying calories and why they matter
You can’t see calories. You can’t hear them. You can’t even taste them. Even if you had a high-power microscope, you couldn’t identify the calories in a sample of food. That’s because a calorie isn’t a “thing.” It’s a measurement, like an inch or an ounce or a mile. A calorie measures the amount of energy produced when your body metabolizes foods — or more accurately, the macronutrients in foods.
When a certain type of food contains a certain amount of calories, what that really means is that as soon as your body metabolizes a certain amount of food, that food can provide a certain amount of energy. How many calories are in a particular food depends on how much carbohydrate, fat, or protein the food contains. (You can find the calorie content of these individual macronutrients in Chapter 3.)
If the number of calories you consume equals the number of calories you burn, you’ll maintain your current weight. If you consume more calories than your body uses on a regular basis, you gain weight and store those extra calories as fat. I’m sorry, but you can’t avoid it. If you consume fewer calories than your body burns on a regular basis, you lose weight. There’s no other way.
To lose weight and keep it off, you have to find your own individual balance between the calories you consume and the calories you burn. Exercise does boost your metabolism so that you burn calories more efficiently. The more you exercise, the more calories you’ll burn. Even when you increase your exercise, however, you only lose weight if you’re consuming fewer calories than your body needs to fuel all that additional activity. It’s that simple. If your exercise routine is very intense, you may find yourself ravenous after your workouts and, as a result, consuming too many extra calories to lose weight. The solution is to keep an eye on your total daily calorie intake and be sure to factor in some snack calories every day. That way, if your exercise routine leaves you hungry, you can use your snack calories to tide you over until it’s time to eat a regular meal.
As you age, your metabolism starts slowing down and the rate at which you burn calories drops by about 2 percent every ten years. If you’re still consuming the same number of calories at age 40 that you did at age 20, and you’re not exercising more, you can easily start putting on 10 or more pounds a year.
Figuring out why gaining weight is so easy for some people
Gaining weight is easy — many people do it! All you have to do is get into the habit of eating the types and amounts of food that contribute more calories than you can possibly metabolize as energy. That’s all it takes. The years go by, and your eating habits catch up with you. Just 100 excess calories a day (the number of calories in a handful of pretzels or a couple of mini muffins) adds up to 36,500 excess calories at the end of a year and those calories result in a 101⁄2 pound weight gain. After just a few years, you have a big weight problem.
You may be the type of person who gains weight just looking at a cheese plat- ter, while your coworker can devour second and third helpings without putting on an ounce. Her metabolism is different from yours. It’s probably faster. Chances are, though, her attitude toward food and exercise is different too. She may dislike exercise as much as you do, but she may have figured out what she needs to do in terms of exercise because she feels the payoff is worth it.
Some people simply move more than others throughout the natural course of their day, which helps them maintain a healthier weight. Thanks to a documented phenomenon known as the “fidget factor,” these people burn several hundred calories a day just by their use of body language. They often walk fast and talk fast, and they can’t sit still for long. Even if their jobs keep them in front of a computer all day, they have to get up frequently and move around. If you know someone who frequently fidgets, you’ve probably noticed that he or she can get away with eating more food than someone with a calm demeanor.
Everyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows that losing weight isn’t always as simple as balancing eating and exercise. Other factors are involved in weight gain. For instance, if being overweight or obesity runs in your family, then you may have a genetic predisposition to easy weight gain. On the other hand, even if your parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are mostly overweight, it may not be in your genes. It may just be that you picked up bad eating habits.
Many of your diet routines — the times of day you eat, the types of food you choose, the reasons why you eat, and even your habits of eating slowly or quickly, reading the newspaper, or watching television while you eat — probably came from your parents, who “inherited” them from their parents, and so on. SeeExamining your family history” later in this chapter for more about taking your family history into account.
Recognizing why losing weight is so hard for some people
Unlike gaining weight, losing weight when you’re healthy is rarely easy. Why? Losing weight just isn’t as simple as gaining weight. To gain weight, you don’t have to understand all the different reasons why you’re doing it. You just have to overeat or underexercise. To lose weight, and lose it for good, however, you need to have a better understanding of how and why you gained weight so you don’t just keep on repeating the behavior. (See the next section to figure out how you reached your current weight.)
For some people, being overweight becomes a chronic condition, just like heart disease or osteoporosis. It won’t go away by itself and no quick-fix diet can resolve it. You need a lifetime plan that includes a calorie-controlled diet and exercise program you can comfortably stick with.
Hundreds of strategies for losing weight are available, but not every plan works for every person. Everyone has a different build, metabolism, genetic makeup, and tolerances and preferences for diet and exercise plans. That’s why no one-size-fits-all diet exists. You have to participate in the development of your own personal weight-control plan to be successful. Your plan must be flexible, and it has to keep you feeling happy and satisfied or you won’t feel motivated to stick to it.
Gaining weight is something you can do by yourself, but to lose weight, most people need the support of family, friends, and, often, strangers in the form of professionals and members of support groups. In the past, if diets have failed you, your support system may have been weak. If so, you may have given up and gone back to your old habits.
Although asking others for help may be difficult, now is most certainly the time to do it! If you don’t have much of a built-in support system by way of family and friends, search for a weight-loss support group that you feel comfortable with. Flip to Chapter 11 for more handy tips on asking for help and using outside resources.
A Trip through Time: Taking Stock of How You Arrived Here
What’s your weight story? Have you lost and gained weight over the years or is reading this book your first attempt at losing weight? Have you been over- weight most of your life or did you put on the “freshman 15” in college and watch your weight story go downhill from there? Maybe you gained weight hen you settled down and got married or after you had a baby. Or, maybe you’ve been watching your weight for quite a while but just can’t knock off those last 10 pounds.
Whatever your story is, you need to examine your own weight history to see how you reached your present weight. At the same time, take a look at your family history — your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings — to identify any pattern you may be following.
Reviewing your weight history
Looking back can be good when you’re trying to lose weight. I don’t mean look- ing back and regretting every cookie you ever put in your mouth or remember- ing all the times you tried to lose weight and failed. Rather, take the time to look back for clues that can help you figure out when and how you became overweight so you can move forward without making the same mistakes you’ve made in the past. (For ideas about how to deal with old challenges in new ways, see Chapter 9.) If you’ve tried to lose weight in the past, figure out what worked and what didn’t work for you so you can focus on any tips and advice that helped you stay on track (see “Evaluating your diet history” later in this chapter to get started).
The skinny on fat cells
You may be overweight because you have extra fat cells in your body, or because the fat cells you have are jumbo size. When you overeat, you’re essentially feeding your fat cells. When you gain weight, each individual fat cell gains weight. When fat cells get to be around three times their normal size, they can split and you end up with more fat cells than you had before. (The point at which a fat cell actually divides varies from person to person.) This process of cell division wouldn’t be so terrible if fat cells died the way other old body cells do, but no. Your fat cells live as long as you do.
Researchers once thought that people could only grow new fat cells during specific stages of growth, such as the first year of life and uberty. But it turns out, people can grow them as adults, too. If you’ve gained a lot of weight as an adult, you may be carrying around many more fat cells than you did when you were younger.
When you lose weight, your fat cells shrink and lose weight, too, but they don’t go away. Fat cells are evil. They hang around in your body, just waiting to fill up on more fat. They want nothing more than to sabotage your attempt to lose weight. Don’t give in! Don’t let them win! The only way to come out on top is to stop overeating and get enough exercise to burn away spare calories from excess food that may find its way into your fat cells.
Overweight babies often turn into overweight adults. If you were a chubby baby who turned into a chubby kid and grew to be an overweight teenager, then you’re probably an overweight or obese adult. If you were an overweight child, odds are that you may struggle with your weight as an adult. Don’t fret though. You have hope. The best thing you can do is be realistic. Accept the challenge you’ve been given and move on. (Check out the next section about how your family history can affect your weight.)
If you didn’t have weight problems growing up, losing any excess weight you’ve accumulated in your adult years may be easier, because your weight gain is probably circumstantial. You may have gained weight because you left home and freed yourself from your parents’ strict rules about what you could and couldn’t eat and started eating more junk food. Now you need to get back on track and make healthier choices. Or you may just need to discover a little more about how your metabolism naturally slows down as you get older and what you can do about it.
Examining your family history
If being overweight is a part of your family history, the bad news is that you may have inherited a genetic tendency to become overweight yourself. That’s the sad truth. When you inherit a tendency toward being overweight, it’s the same as having a family history of any medical problem. Although you may or may not be affected, you have to be careful and do what you can to pre- vent the same thing from happening to you. The good news: If you see that you’re starting to resemble the heavyweights in your family, you can do something about it. You didn’t inherit any actual fat, you only inherited a tendency to collect it. To a certain degree, you can control your tendencies and change your destiny.
If being overweight runs in your family, losing weight is probably going to be harder for you than for someone with leaner relatives. If you inherited bad eating habits along with a genetic tendency to gain weight, losing weight is even more of a challenge. You’ll be fighting your genes and trying to break a lifetime of bad habits at the same time. You can do it! (Check out Chapter 4 for info and tips on breaking bad habits.)
If you’re not the only overweight family member, you may be able to enlist the help and support of other relatives who are struggling with similar issues. If you live with family members who are overweight, you can follow these suggestions and make it a family effort:
� Figure out how your immediate family members can help you and per- haps help themselves at the same time. The best thing you can do is employ practical solutions. Reading this book is a good start. No lectures, please!
� Cook together or share what you know about low-calorie cooking. If your mother or significant other does the cooking in the house and you want it done differently, share a few low-calorie cooking tips. You can also spend time and discover tips together. (Chapter 5 is a great place to start.)
� Go food shopping together. Make grocery shopping a family affair.
While shopping, monitor each other’s choices as you walk up and down he aisles.
� Exercise together. Get the family together for group exercises or at the very least, a family walk after dinner (instead of dessert).
A New Beginning: Altering Your Diet Plan
Getting yourself into better shape can start today. It isn’t too late. You’re never too fat or too old to start eating better, and only certain people with certain medical restrictions have valid excuses for not eating better or get- ting more exercise. Even people with medical problems usually have alternative solutions.
If you’re older, or even if you’re young but you’ve been dieting unsuccessfully for many years, you first may need to undo some extra damage. The longer you indulge in unhealthy eating habits, the more ingrained they become and the harder they are to change. The more times you go on a temporary diet, lose weight, and then gain it back again, the more total weight you’re likely to gain. After a number of years, you may be heavier than if you hadn’t gone on any diets at all.
The trick now is to never give up hope and play an active role in developing a healthful, lower-calorie eating plan you can stick to for your lifetime. The fol- lowing sections provide advice for folks who are new to healthy eating and for those of you who are weight-management veterans. You have the benefit of diet wisdom now. Use it!
For beginners only
You may encounter more weight-loss misinformation floating around than reliable advice. If you’re new to the weight-loss game — and it is something of a game — you’re going to hear and read all types of tips and advice on how to do it, what foods to eat and not eat, and what works and what doesn’t. Listen selectively! Listen only to true experts, including seasoned dieters who’ve been there, tried that, and can tell you the truth about fad diets and other weight-loss gimmicks. Remember that in the diet industry, everyone has something to sell, so spend your money wisely!
The following sections separate dieting myths from truths and give you tips on how to start living your low-calorie lifestyle.
Deciphering weight-loss fact and fiction
Weight-loss myths abound and this section for “newbies” is a good place to dispel as many of them as possible. Experienced dieters have heard these myths before, though some of you old-timers who are reading this info may appreciate the reminders.
Here are six popular diet myths, debunked:
� Eating in between meals makes you fat. The truth is, snacking can actually help you lose weight. The purpose of a snack is to prevent you from getting so hungry that you overeat at your next meal. (For more about healthy snacking, see Chapter 15.)
� You must stick to a strict number of calories to lose weight. In fact, you can lose weight with a range of calories (for more info, check out Chapter 3). Also, you’ll be more successful at weight loss if you give in and cheat a little (with an emphasis on “little”) once in while, especially if you feel hungry, than if you allow yourself to get too hungry and end up binge eating.
� Eating certain specific foods helps you burn calories. Have you ever heard that you can lose weight by eating only cabbage soup? How about the grapefruit diet? Has anyone ever told you that it takes more calories to digest an apple than the apple itself contains? If you haven’t heard any of these stories yet, you will. Unfortunately, none of them are true. Sure, digesting your food does take some energy, and it involves burning calories, but there’s no such thing as a “digestion diet.” No matter what type of food you eat, the digestion process could never use up enough calories to make any difference in your weight.
Eating late at night causes you to gain more weight than eating during the day. Not true. The total amount and type of food you eat is what matters, not when you eat it. Many people often eat after dinner as a form of entertainment or a way to alleviate boredom, not to satisfy hunger, so the food choices tend to be higher calorie snack foods. If food is a form of entertainment for you, the more you feel bored, the more you’ll eat. (Chapter 9 talks more about why people eat when they’re not really hungry and how to battle this problem.)
� Reduced-fat and fat-free foods can help you lose weight. Certain natu- rally fat-free foods, such as vegetables and fruits, can help you lose weight because you can fill up on larger quantities of these foods for fewer calories than if you were to choose food higher in fat. Fat-free convenience food products, however, are another story. Many of these foods contain so much added sugar or other ingredients that they con- tribute just as many, if not more, calories to your diet.
� Using sugar substitutes helps you lose weight. As I write, a new wave of diet products is pushing its way onto supermarket shelves. These products all contain the most recently approved sugar substitute that slashes their calories in half. The sudden appearance of these products coincides with a rising trend of eliminating sugar from the diet to lose weight and the release of new dietary guidelines from government health experts, advising overweight people to cut calories to lose weight. How convenient for food manufacturers!
Over the years, I’ve seen just about every weight-loss trend and gimmick come and go and come back again. You may not have seen it all yet, but you have access to the same facts I do and you can probably put two and two together as well as I can. Check out these two facts:
• On the whole, Americans have gotten fatter and fatter over the past 100 years.
• Sugar substitutes, also known as artificial sweeteners and low- calorie sweeteners, have been around for more than 125 years.
Put two and two together and the answer is that sugar substitutes are not the answer to weight control! (Check out Chapter 5 for more information on sugar substitutes.)
Using sugar substitutes is a matter of personal choice. If you’re comfort- able with the products and you want to use them in your low-calorie plan, it’s entirely up to you. The problem with sugar substitutes is that they may lead you to believe you can eat more food because you’re not getting as many calories from sugar. Sugar substitutes don’t teach you how to eat less food overall, and that’s why, in the bigger picture, they don’t work as a weight-loss tool.
Starting from scratch
If this diet is your first attempt at losing weight, then you’re in luck. Although it’s never too late to shape up, doing so is much easier if you aren’t already frustrated by years of failed attempts.
Keep an open mind when you set out to lose weight. Initially, you have a big job ahead of you. Sure, you can skip all the reading, journaling, calculating, and planning suggested in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 and just head straight for the actual diet plans in Chapter 6. But chances are, if you do that, you’ll be back to this chapter in no time, trying to figure out what went wrong.
The more research you do upfront to understand how you arrived in your state of being overweight and to develop a personal plan for yourself to lose weight, the more successful you’ll be in the long run. This first diet may be your last if you approach it somewhat cautiously, rather than diving in head- first. Yes, you want to feel confident, but you also need to know what you’re doing in advance. Almost every success story starts with a well thought-out plan, and every chapter in this book counts as part of a bigger plan to help you lose weight once and for all.
For pros
Expectations have a lot to do with success. Your expectations also have every- thing to do with how confident you feel about yourself and about your ability to lose weight. Your expectations must be realistic, of course, or you’ll be dis- appointed early on. This book isn’t designed to help you lose 10 pounds by the end of next week. This book’s intention is simple: to show you the only surefire way to lose weight and help make the path to permanent weight loss a little easier to follow.
If you have plenty of experience with dieting, you’re probably more receptive to ideas that worked for you in the past, and skeptical about advice that didn’t work or that you didn’t enjoy following. That’s okay; just remember to be open-minded concerning weight-loss ideas. This book helps you get as much pleasure as possible out of food while you’re discovering how to live a low-cal lifestyle. I hope you can find some new ideas in this book that work for you, that make low-calorie dieting as satisfying as possible, and that hold your interest long enough that you can follow through on your goal to maintain a low-cal lifestyle and feel good about the way you look and feel.
In the following sections, I ask you to look at the diets you’ve tried, and I explain how to move on to a new low-calorie lifestyle.
Evaluating your diet history
Are you a weight cycler? If you’ve gained and lost weight repeatedly through- out your life, then you probably fit the bill. If you’re a weight cycler, you’ve probably been on numerous diets. You lose weight while you’re on the diet, and then gain it back soon after you stop dieting. So you go on another diet, lose some of the weight you gained last time around, and then gain it all back again. Sometimes you even gain back more than you originally lost. Sound familiar?
This up-again, down-again weight cycling is called yo-yo dieting. Some medical experts say that yo-yo dieting is more dangerous to your health than being overweight. They say that you’re better off staying at the same weight, even if it’s higher than your ideal weight, than you are to repeatedly lose weight and gain it back again. Not all experts agree, however, because plenty of scientific evidence shows clear associations between being overweight and a number of medical conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. So finding a diet plan that helps you stay as close to your ideal weight as possible still makes good health sense. The clue to success is to stick with that plan for the rest of your life. That’s why choosing the right plan is essential.
Moving on
If you’ve been on more diets than you can count and never managed to maintain a healthy or comfortable weight, then the thought of dieting probably aggravates you. You’re probably frustrated because every diet you ever went on was somehow about deprivation. Don’t eat this food. Don’t eat that food. After a while you felt deprived and never satisfied about what you were eating. Are you really surprised that you became discouraged along the way and gave up? No diet will ever work if the focus is on deprivation.
Think realistically about the different diets you’ve followed in your lifetime and why they didn’t work in the long run. Make a list of what you liked and didn’t like about all the diets in your life. Reject anything you didn’t like because it’s probably not going to work any better for you the second time around. Incorporate what you liked and what you found helpful into this plan. You can probably live comfortably on fewer calories than you’re now eating, but what’s most important for long-term success is that the calories you do eat come from foods you enjoy and that you don’t feel unnecessarily deprived.
Low-calorie dieting to lose weight means eating fewer calories than you’re currently eating, but you don’t have to deprive yourself. You can cut calories and still fill yourself up with plenty of good food. A low-calorie diet that works is one that is flexible enough to allow you to eat any food you want and still stay within your calorie allowance. On this type of diet, you have the choice of eating larger quantities of low-calorie foods or smaller quantities of higher calorie foods, or a combination of both. You have choices and you can change your mind from day to day about how you want to eat to stay motivated and stick to your plan.
Tools of the Trade: Figuring Out How Overweight You Are
When you’re overweight, you usually know it. Your clothes feel tight and your body bulges where it didn’t before. You feel like you’re jiggling when you walk down the street. You look in the mirror and your excess weight is staring
right back at you. Ignoring it is difficult because half of your total body fat lies just beneath your skin.
Being overweight means different things to different people. The following definitions clarify it so you clearly understand when health experts use the terms overweight and obese.
� Overweight means you’re 10 to 20 percent higher than your normal, healthy weight. (You can determine your healthy weight in the next section.) For instance, if a healthy weight for you is 125 pounds, you’re overweight if you weigh 13 to 26 pounds more than that, or between 138 and 151 pounds.
� Obese means you weigh 20 percent or more than your normal, healthy weight and your excess weight comes from body fat.
If your extra weight is from muscle you’ve developed by lifting weights or doing other exercises, you may be several pounds overweight by any of the usual standards. This type of overweight is different from the type of overweight that results from excess fat, and the usual standards don’t apply to you. The standards only apply if you’re “overfat,” which means your excess weight is coming from excess fat and may be a threat to your health.
� Morbidly obese means you’re 50 to 100 percent above your healthy weight or you’re sufficiently overweight to have serious health problems.
The following sections are devoted to different ways you can measure your- self and compare yourself to standard weight charts to see just how far you are from your healthy weight. This information can help you establish your long-term weight-loss goal in Chapter 4.
Interpreting a healthy weight range chart
Nutrition experts developed the weight range chart in Figure 2-1 to provide weight-loss professionals and dieters with a quick and simple way to deter- mine healthy weights according to height, for men and women alike.
Find your height in the first column on the left side of the chart, and then move your finger across the graph to a midway point in the healthy weight section to find out approximately how much you should weigh when you’re at your healthiest weight.
Most importantly, this chart shows you a 25-pound weight range for different people who are the same height. Even if you and I are the same height, we may have different amounts of bones and muscles. If you have more muscle and denser bones than me, you may weigh more than I do, but you’re not any more overweight than I am. A higher weight within the range probably applies to you, and a lower weight probably applies to me. Men, for instance, often have a higher percentage of muscle tissue and bone mass than women. A younger woman probably has more muscle and bone than an older woman of the same height. Your healthiest and most comfortable weight probably falls somewhere midway in the range for your height.
Just because a healthy weight range chart provides a wide range of healthy weights for your height doesn’t necessarily mean gaining weight to the top of your range is healthful. Higher weights are generally considered the norm for men, very athletic women, and anyone else who has a larger frame and more muscle weight.
Computing your BMI
Body Mass Index (BMI) is a slightly more accurate way of measuring yourself than simply looking yourself up on a healthy weight chart. In combination with your waist measurement (which I cover in “Determining your waist-to- hip ratio” later in this chapter), BMI can tell you if your weight is putting you at risk of developing chronic medical conditions.
You can use either the formula or the chart in the following sections to deter- mine your BMI. The formula is just slightly more precise than the chart; I pro- vide the formula for those of you who like doing diet math. The chart is an easy way out for the rest of you!
Using the formula
To compute your BMI mathematically, use the following formula:
In this case, your BMI is 27.1, and you’re considered overweight.
Checking out the chart
To use the chart in Figure 2-2, find your height in the first column, and then move your finger along that row until you find your weight. Move your finger straight up that row until you hit your BMI.
Determining your waist-to-hip ratio
If you own a measuring tape, you can measure yourself to determine where you carry most of the excess fat on your body. Calculating your waist-to-hip ratio helps you determine not only where you carry most of your fat, but also how much of a threat your fat actually poses to your health.
Inch by inch
Do you want to figure out where your extra weight is (if you don’t already notice it in a mirror?) and if that makes you an apple or a pear? If so, this section can help. Use a tape measure and take the following steps to figure out your waist-to-hip ratio:
1. Stand in a relaxed position with your feet together and your belly hanging out.
(You don’t necessarily want to be standing in front of a mirror when you take this measurement.)
2. Measure your waist at its narrowest point.
Write down that number.
3. Measure your hips at their widest part (midway around your butt).
Write down that number, too.
4. Divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement.
The resulting figure is your waist-to-hip ratio.
Your weight is considered healthy if your waist-to-hip ratio is less than 0.8 for women and less than 0.9 for men. If you’re a woman and your ratio is between 1.8 and 0.85, or a man with a ratio between 0.9 and 1.0, you may be at moderately high risk of developing health problems associated with being over- weight. Higher ratios indicate higher risk.
Nowadays, your waist size gets more attention from health experts than its relationship to your hips. One of the most significant predictors of health problems is a large waist size coupled with a high BMI. If you’re a man with a waist size more than 40 inches or a woman with a waist size more than 35 inches, and your BMI is higher than 25, you’re at an especially high risk for developing health problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
Apples and pears
So after you know your waist-to-hip ratio, you can determine what type of fruit shape you are. Apples and pears exemplify two very specific body types.
� An apple-shaped person carries his excess weight on the upper half of his body, around the waist. If you’re an apple-shaped person, your waist- to-hip ratio is less than 0.8 if you’re a woman and less than 0.9 if you’re a man. (The formula for figuring out your waist-to-hip ratio is in the previous section.)
� A pear-shaped person carries most of her weight below the waist, on the hips and thighs, and in the rear. If you’re a pear-shaped person, your waist-to-hip ratio is higher than 0.8 if you’re a woman and higher than 1.9 if you’re a man.
Apples are at greater risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers than pears. But if you’re an apple, never fear! You can eat less and exercise more to reduce your belly fat and possibly reduce your risk of developing any of these medical problems.
You inherit your basic body shapes, for the most part, and men are more likely to be shaped like apples while women are more likely to be shaped like pears. But no hard-and-fast rule dictates a person’s shape because shapes change, and factors like age and alcohol consumption have been known to turn pear-shaped women into apples, with all the associated health risks.
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