Nutritionists use several different tools to calculate a person’s healthy weight range. The good news, you don’t need to be an expert to use many of those same assessments.
Making friends with the scale
Scientists concur that keeping tabs on your progress by weighing yourself often (and recording the weight) is one of the best tools for helping you achieve your weight-loss goals. In fact, stepping on the scale is the best way to assess whether your intermittent fasting program is working for you. If you don’t see a drop in weight over time, then you need to reassess your program and tweak your plan. If you’re trying to hit a specific number or weight range, weighing yourself is the simplest and most accurate means of determining your starting point and whether you’ve reached your goal.
You may hate the idea of the scale, but frequent self-weighing is not only beneficial for losing weight, but it also helps prevent weight gain associated with aging as well as stopping weight regain after loss. Be brave, step on that scale!
Remember not all scales are created equally. Different scales can yield different results at different times of day. Therefore, experts recommend routinely using the same scale to highlight your progress.
Weigh in the morning. If you weigh yourself at night, especially after you’ve eaten, you’re going to weigh more than you truly do. Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, unclothed, and definitely not after an exercise bout.
Wear your birthday suit. Clothes can add up to two pounds on the scale that don’t account for your actual body weight. Weigh yourself unclothed.
Don’t weigh every day. You won’t see major changes from day to day and checking the scale that frequently can do more harm than good by affecting your mood and motivation. Twice a week is ideal.
You don’t take a holistic approach. The number on the scale shouldn’t be the only measure of your success. Just because the numbers on the scale aren’t moving, or aren’t moving fast enough for you, doesn’t mean your body isn’t changing in a positive direction. You can still be losing fat, perhaps gaining a tad of muscle, and looking at your newfound energy boost as positive markers that your healthy lifestyle is working.
When you’re trying to lose weight, you can easily let the number on the scale ruin your day. Don’t overstress it. You may have eaten too much water- retaining sodium, you may be adding muscle, or you may have overeaten. Weight fluctuates naturally, and because weight on a scale isn’t always reflective of other positive changes that are happening in your body, I suggest you use other methods of assessment tools that I outline in the following sections.
Guesstimating accurately
Starting with a rough idea of your healthy weight is better than nothing. Here’s a quick, down and dirty calculation that can give you a fast estimate of whether you’re overweight. Since this calculation was originally created, many nations’ populations have literally expanded and people have gotten heavier. Therefore, keep in mind, that this guesstimate tends to make your ideal weight range much lower compared to the other calculations in this chapter:
For men: Start with 106 pounds for 5 feet in height and then add 6 pounds per inch where you’re taller than 5 feet or subtract 6 pounds per inch if you’re shorter than 5 feet. The healthy weight range would be plus or minus 10 percent.
For women: Start with 100 pounds for 5 feet in height and then add 5 pounds per inch where you’re taller than 5 feet or subtract 5 pounds per inch if you’re shorter than 5 feet. The healthy weight range would be plus or minus 10 percent.
Here’s an example of this method:
Debbie is a 50-year-old woman. She is 5-5 tall and weighs 160 pounds.
Debbie’s healthy weight range is between 112.5 pounds and 137.5 pounds. Therefore, according to this method (which does tend to underestimate ideal weight range), Debbie needs to lose approximately 20 pounds to reach her healthy weight goal.
www.calculator.net/ideal-weight-calculator.html) that uses several popular science-based weight formulas (based on your height, gender, and age) and then displays the results side-by-side to allow you to see your ideal weight at the click of your mouse. Plugging Debbie’s age and height into the calculator gives you a range of ideal body weights from 125 to 132 pounds.
Using your Body Mass Index to see whether you’re overweight
Doctors use a mass screening tool to give them another quick way to instantly see if their patient’s weight puts their patient at risk for health problems. The body mass index (BMI) is a good estimate of body fat, based on height and weight, that applies only to adult men and women.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines BMI categories as such:
Healthy weight: 18.5 to 24.9
Overweight: 25 to 29.9
Obese: 30 or greater
