BMI Chart for Men and Women

Did you know that the BMI chart for men and the BMI chart for women were the same chart. Furthermore, the cdc and the nhs recommend that for men and women of the same height that they should be the same weight. Whoa, before I began to research this, I would have thought that men should weigh more than women. When I was a little boy reading comic books, I remember when The Hulk came out....now there was a masculine body. Fast forward 50 years and I still do not have that body. Perhaps if you want to personify masculinity, The Hulk has the ideal weight, but men, if you want to be healthy you are going to have to weigh a little less.

Women, Many of you may be facing the opposite role models. How many of you have wanted to have the figure of a runway model. Perhaps if you want to be a model that is your ideal body weight, but if you want to be healthy, you will want to weigh a little more. You are not a little girl anymore, and should not be striving for a girly figure.

Oh, I can think of one difference between a BMI chart for men and women. A BMI chart for men will probably be shaded in blue and yellow while the BMI chart for women will be in pink and green.

Since this is a BMI Chart for Women and Men, I will use pink and green.

In this chart you find your height in inches on the left and then go to the right until you find your weight, then go up until you find your BMI.

Short History of BMI

Adolphe Quetelet is the one who is given credit with coming up with the BMI formula. His formula was used just to describe the shape of normal men in his home of Belgium. He was not doing Medical Research.

Before BMI was widely adopted (in US) in the 1980s, fatness was largely determined by height/weight charts. These early BMI standards considered men with a BMI >=27.8 and women with a BMI >=27.3 to be "overweight." So if you thought that the BMI for men should be different than the BMI of women, so did the doctors years ago,however, in 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered their BMI cutoffs to be the same as the World Health Organization standards. Under the present guidelines, a BMI of 25 is considered "overweight," and 30 or more is considered "obese." If you think 25 is too low, in 2009 India started a new diagnostic cut-off for the body mass index of 23 kg/m2 as opposed to 25 kg/m2 globally. This was because there was so much diabetes in India. Singapore also uses 23 as a cut off. New Zealand divides the cut off three ways (Asian and Indian - 23, European - 25, Maori and Pacific Islanders - 26)

Stay tuned, because because BMI is not perfect and because being overweight is so important, I feel certain that new tools are in our future.

Here is the same BMI Chart for Men and Women, but in a different format.

Metric BMI Chart for Men and Women

This is once again the same information, but uses cm and kg (the metric system for those who weight themselves in kilograms.

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Related Resources at Ideal-Weight-Charts.com

Need more information about how BMI charts for men and BMI charts for women change with age?

Chart for Women only? BMI Chart for Women

More General Information about the Body Mass Index Chart?

See how the BMI chart compares to other ideal weight charts.

See what John Barban has to say about BMI Charts.

Is the BMI formula the best formula? Should there be a different exponent? A Different BMI Exponent.

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