My mother is 5'-11". Two of my sisters are 6'-1". My wife is 6'-3". All three of my daughters are over 6'. I've been around tall women all my life.
Tall women are told pretty much their entire lives that they're overweight and this is based on Body Mass Index.
There are several ways of figuring BMI, but one of the most common is to divide mass in kilos by height in meters squared. So BMI is inversely proportional to the square of the height under this formula.
In the real world though, mass increases at a much sharper vector relative to height. If I were to wave a magic wand at you and make you twice as big as you are now, you wouldn't weigh twice as much. You would weigh eight times as much. Mass actually increases by the cube of the multiplier.
So most height to weight tables, like the one that can found here at the NIH website are way, way off at the top end of the spectrum of human height.
Since this is easier to see with actual pictures, I will show you what overweight and obese look like when a woman is 6 foot+ in height.
This is overweight by more than ten pounds:
And this is obese. (>30 lbs. overweight)
--Not very fair if you ask me.
And yet insurance companies and even some licensed M.D.'s take these tables seriously.
Tall women are told pretty much their entire lives that they're overweight and this is based on Body Mass Index.
There are several ways of figuring BMI, but one of the most common is to divide mass in kilos by height in meters squared. So BMI is inversely proportional to the square of the height under this formula.
In the real world though, mass increases at a much sharper vector relative to height. If I were to wave a magic wand at you and make you twice as big as you are now, you wouldn't weigh twice as much. You would weigh eight times as much. Mass actually increases by the cube of the multiplier.
So most height to weight tables, like the one that can found here at the NIH website are way, way off at the top end of the spectrum of human height.
Since this is easier to see with actual pictures, I will show you what overweight and obese look like when a woman is 6 foot+ in height.
This is overweight by more than ten pounds:
And this is obese. (>30 lbs. overweight)
--Not very fair if you ask me.
And yet insurance companies and even some licensed M.D.'s take these tables seriously.
Put the internet to work for you.
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