Tuesday, August 19, 2008

What's The Weight?

One of the benefits of running that I hope to realize is weight loss. Right now I weigh 229, which is not horrible for a 6'4" male, but I'm still considered overweight.

As a former gym rat, I for one, know the absurdity of "ideal weight" and why the BMI isn't perfect, but I also know the value of benchmarks and points of reference.

According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's online calculator, my BMI is 27.9, which is considered overweight. Playing around with the calculator, I discovered I would need to drop to 204.5lbs to be at the high-end of normal (24.9). In my opinion 205 would be really skinny. To demonstrate the inaccuracy of the BMI stat, Cincinnati Bengal's WR TJ Houshmanzadah is 6'1", 199lbs and is fit but skinny. His BMI however is 27 meaning he's overweight.

Does he look overweight to you?

Active.com's ideal weight calculator states that someone my height should weigh 202lbs. I think that's pretty low, but I've seen some charts that put my ideal weight at 197.

I honestly don't know what I'd look like at 197, probably like a competitive marathoner, which I'm not sure I want to look like (no offense to competitive marathoners). Lets get down to 215 and go from there.

To track my weight loss, I took another page from Abelfarei and created a skinnyr.com graph widget which will be permanently displayed in the right column of this blog. I plan on weighing myself once a week. I'd do it more often, but I'm afraid I'd get a little obsessed with it.

Here's a graph showing the starting point measured Sunday early evening.


Get your own graph at skinnyr



Exciting eh?

1 comment:

PointSpecial said...

BMI is an o.k. estimator... but it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It doesn't count at all for bone density or muscle tone. My BMI right now is 34.8, and by anyone's standards, I'm overweight. But for me to get down to my "normal" weight, I'd have to get down to 232. When I was training hardcore for college athletics, I was at around 245, at the minimum. Since then, I've added quite a bit of muscle. And muscle is denser than fat (heavier), so as you lose fat and gain muscle, you won't lose as much weight as if you just lost the fat (but your body will be healthier).

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to be considered "normal" for the BMI calculator. And though I'm not using that as a cop out, that's ok with me. There are way too many other factors that go into it that aren't taken into account when just taking height and weight!!