Weekly weigh in

[lnr]

This week I lost 2lb, with which I am once again surprised ad pleased. Only a pound to go! I've decided to stick at that target for at least a month before deciding if I want to lose any more. Might not make it next week though as I'm spending the weekend in France and intend to be flexible about what I eat and drink over the weekend.

Over the past 10½ months of dieting I've lost 4st 1lb, which amounts to 27% of my starting weight - my current weight is 11st 1lb

My average loss a week is 1¼lb

My target weight is 11st. I am currently 0st 1lb away from this.

My current BMI is 24.91; my target BMI is 24.75.

The past 10½ months weight change	The past 4 months weight change
The past 10½ months BMI change	The past 4 months BMI change

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~eleanorb/weight/ for more details.

Comments

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Yay! Well done!

[stephaniewalker.livejournal.com]

How do you work out your BMI?

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Weight in kilograms divided by (height in metres) squared. The unit is kg/m². For those of you who believe such categorisations to be helpful, under 20 is sometimes referred to as "underweight" and over 25 is sometimes referred to as "overweight".

I notice that the blue line has now crossed the purple one. Insert your own "squee" with lots of "e"s and "w00t" with lots of "0"s here. :-)

Fantastic stuff all the same and have loads of fun in France!

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Its done automatically by the scripts of mine lnr is using :)

To work it out for yourself, you take your weight in kilograms and divide it by the square of your height in meters; essentially:

The following is probably going to be more useful on the assumption that you've got your weight in stones and pounds:

The number you get out of the end has the following meaning the medical community:

It should be noted that there is a fair amount of controversy surrounding the BMI system given that it doesn't take things like muscle mass, body shapes, etc into account. However to my knowledge no one has yet come up with a replacement.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Think I recently heard that if more than 30% of your body mass was made up of fat then that was considered to be bad. Can't remember what sort of bad specifically, because these terms are unhelpful, just generally bad.

Actually, here (http://www.healthchecksystems.com/bodyfat.htm) is a link about it. There are a number of ways of measuring your body fat percentage, of which the bod pod (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/nycu/health/hescale.htm) (see the bottom) sounds the most reliable, convenient and fun.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

The 30% body fat thing is something I've also seen.

Another, cheaper, way of measuring body fat is to use a set of scales which uses an electric current to measure the amount of fat in your body. It does have to be calibrated to the body sizes of each user tho, so I don't know how accurate it actually is.

[lnr]

Don't forget that recommended body fat percentages are very different indeed for men and women: far more of our bodies is made up of essential fat tissue. The 30% figure doesn't ring a bell, though.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

This is very true. According to this page (http://www.reallyfit.com/tanita.cfm) it also varies with age.

For me my health body fat range would be 8% to 20%. For you the healthy range would be 21% to 33%

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Most of the online BMI calculators I can find say that below 18.5 or 19 is underweight, while agreeing that between 20 and 25 is ideal. Do you think that a BMI of about 19 is unhealthy?

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Well, to be strict, below 20 is 19... admittedly 19.<something> :)

Personally I think that the whole BMI thing is a little bit of a con... that said, if your BMI is a lot below 20 (say 17 or so) then its going to be a cause of concern.

If you're close to the "normal" range and you're happy with how you look then go with it.

Either that or do some training and put some muscle on - that really screws with the BMI tables :)

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I was just curious about the range of "medical" definitions of "underweight" (and anorexic) which I've seen on the web - there seems to be far more variation here than in definitions of "overweight" or "obese". I'm not particularly worried personally - I'm not unhappy with how I look.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

I've seen that as well; there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut definition of either underweight or overweight these days. Its interesting to note that the upper bound of the "normal" BMI range was dropped by 1 (or was it 2) a couple of years ago from 26/27 to 25.

Personally I think that you look very good as you are right now :)