I have just a BMI test to my horror it told me I was nearly 3 stone overweight and at risk of heart attack, stroke etc do I see the Doc?

[JohnnyH1]

I consider myself to be relatively fit and exercise regularly, my diet is reasonably healthy with the odd treat (chocky bar or cake).

[OlsBean]

I should not put too much emphasis on BMI, it should be used only as a guide. I believe it works well for categorising people when they are at extreme ends of the scale but it's questionable when you are nearer "norm", the formula used by the NHS is also considered to be outdated because it does not take into account that the mass of body parts changes with height (I think) and lastly it's also argued by some that the overweight threshold of 25 is not accurate, it should be more like 26.5 (don't quote me though, this is from memory).

There is if you are interested a calculator here telegraph.co.uk/health/heal... that gives an option to use an update formula and more about the update or need for an update at ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog...

HTH

[johnsonfamily38]

I find it quite confusing sometimes; I've lost 4st and got down to what I would consider a good weight - I now have to buy small sized clothes! My weight varies a little (+/- 2kg) but according to the NHS BMI calculator I should loose another 11kg or not.

[MusicMaker]

You don't give your age but it would be worth going to your local surgery and getting all the standard tests done (blood pressure, good and bad cholesterol, blood sugar etc). If you're over 40 you'll get called in sometime within 5 years for those tests anyway, but you can ask for them at any time. That will give a much better idea than just BMI of whether you're at risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc. Body fat percentage is something else you could measure if you exercise a lot as muscle is heavier than fat so a lot of muscle can put up BMI (but it's easy to kid ourselves.) A few years ago there were quite a lot of handheld body fat measures as well as scales that measure body fat percentage.

[gingernut49]

I lost three stone in six months on the 5:2 Diet, based on Dr Michael Mosley's excellent Horizon programme, "Eat, Fast and Live Longer". Please ask if you want to know more about it.

[Windswept1]

I always ate a reasonably healthy diet and exercised but the problem was I still ate too much and didn't exercise enough. By following the HHS plan, upping exercise and couting calories I have lost weight & got fitter.

I am aiming to lose another 5lb to get bmi down but I know for some people that would not be right as they would look and feel too thin.

[Divided]

When he was young my husband decided to lose all his weight citing his BMI as the reason. In the end all his friends frogmarched him to the doctor because they could see he was doing himself damage. He was 15.7 stone and the doctor told him he had to stop crash dieting and that his body wasn't designed to fit the perfect BMI. A few years later we joined a gym and he got a body composition test. The guy took it three times because he couldn't believe his eyes. My husband was now 18 stone but the test showed he was 13.7 stone of lean muscle. He said there were people using that gym 7 days per week who would never have that amount of muscle. They thought the smallest he could be was probably just under 15 stone which only made him about 3 stone overweight... at 18 stone. BMI is all wrong. Get a body composition test.

[Hidden]

Hi JohnnyH1,

"I consider myself to be relatively fit and exercise regularly, my diet is reasonably healthy with the odd treat (chocky bar or cake)."

The truth of the matter is, I would probably have said those very words only a year or so ago! With the benefit of hindsight, I now realise how wrong I would have been.

Unless you have some prevalent medical issue, I would say there is not real need to see your GP. If you do have one (or some) then I would advise finding out how it (those) might impinge upon your weight loss efforts or vice versa.

BMI is a guide - various arguments about how good a guide - but it has the value of being easy to work out. I do rather agree that it is not so good for taller people and also that is was never really originally intended for measuring individual's degree of overweight, it was designed for mapping population body mass.

All that said, you can get your eating and weight under control without any huge difficulty or expense and significantly reduce your risk of various conditions that are more likely in the more weighty.

Have a good read of the NHS web-pages such as live well lose weight.

Good luck with your weight loss journey.