Your Ideal Weight – Do You Need to Lose Fat?

Living healthy is a fashionable trend and there is nothing wrong with it, unless it is misunderstood. Unfortunately, there are myriads of examples when blindly following fashion leads not to amazing but to devastating results. One of those examples is the epidemia of losing fat.

While it is true that the percentage of overweight and obese people is dangerously going upwards and fat becomes a factor for poor health or even early death, very often people try to lose fat not because their health is in danger but because of pressure from lovers, friends, or even society, not paying attention to the fact that the result in this case can be a temporary or permanent damage to one's health.

People are social creatures and the influence of the world around us can't be ignored. If you look at the Hollywood actors and especially actresses, most of them are not slim but almost anorexic. But this is considered to be fashionable and millions of people all over the world try to imitate them without asking questions like: „Do I need to be pin-thin only because my favorite actress or singer is?“

When one decides to start losing fat, the first thing that he or she needs to have in mind is how much weight they would like to get rid of. Losing weight and losing fat is not exactly the same. When you decrease your weight, you lose muscle tissue and water as well. And if you are not properly dieting and practice no physical activity, you will end up with losing more muscles and water than fat.

But even before you start sweating in the gym and counting your daily input of calories, there is one fundamental question to be asked – do you really need to lose weight? Will your health benefit if you decrease your weight? How do you know when to stop?

The answer to all these questions are the various metrics for calculating your ideal weight. Basically, all methods for calculating the ideal weight take several factors into account: gender, age, height, weight, frame. This is quite logical, because it is normal for men to be heavier than women, even if they are the same height. Age is also important (though not that much) because when one is getting older his or her bones become heavier and this inevitably leads to increased weight, even if you have less fat. Frame considers your body structure – are you bones big and heavy or not. If your bones are heavy, your ideal weight is more than the ideal weight of someone whose bones are tiny and light.

When you start searching for ideal weight calculators, you will see that there are plenty of them and that their calculations differ. Well, you can't say that one is more precise than the other but as a rule, most calculators give you a range, not a fixed figure, for your ideal body weight. For instance, an arbitrary calculator that we used for testing, showed that for a female 1.70m high the ideal weight is between 53.5 and 72.3 kg (118 and 159 lbs). Anything ubder and above that poses a health risk.

This result has been checked with 2 more different calculators and the results were differing mainly in the last digit (i.e. 114 and 118 lbs, for example), which is completely negligible. One of the calculators gave an additional firgure – 64 kg as the exact measure of the ideal weight for this height, so we can safely narrow the range of our preferences from 62 to 68 kg.

Another measure if you are within or outside the healthy norm is the Body Mass Index (BMI). It is the correlation between height and weight and depending on this index, your weight is classified as Normal, Overweight, Obese, or Extreme Obese. Still, BMI is not a diagnosis by your physician and is not a reason to start a severe diet right away. It is just a lamp that flashes to warn you that not everything is in order.

Your lifestyle is also a factor, related to your weight. It might sound unfair, but if you are physically active, it is normal to be a little bit heavier than somebody who is the same height, age as you and has the same BMI. The explanation is simple – your muscles weight more than your fat. Not literally of course – a pound is always a pound – but if you have more muscles and are more active, you are „allowed“ to be a few pounds (or kiligrams) heavier and still you are not exceeding the ideal weight limit.

Or as the famous singer Pink responds to accusations that she is fat, the right answer for your worries if you are overweight when you are not pin-thin must be in the line that you are just strong, healthy and sexy! If your weight keeps you healthy and you feel well, why change it?