Abdominal obesity is dangerous to one’s health. It impairs the body’s capacity to respond to insulin, leading to an increase in blood sugar and insulin levels. Excess body fat has been related to a variety of important causes of death and disability, including heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, osteoarthritis, fatty liver, and depression. Given these risks, it’s logical that you’d want to know how much weight you should be carrying. This popular and important question, however, is false. It’s how much belly fat you have, not how much weight you weigh, that matters for your health.
Methods have progressed with time. Standards began to shift as scientists learned that it was body fat, not body weight, that mattered. For determining overweight and obesity, the body mass index (BMI) is still the gold standard. Skinfold measurements are less reliable than BMI in estimating body fat. The BMI has major flaws, while being the official standard. For begin, highly trained athletes with huge muscles can have BMIs of 30 while consuming very little fat.
