BMI is trash and here’s why. 

Hi all! I want to apologize if I came off defensive in any responses to comments. I purposely chose to NOT include any of the political, racial, or sexist implications of BMI in this particular video. And I regret that because I am letting that influence my emotions about people defending the use of BMI today. So for my mental health (and to stop getting so defensive in the comments), I won't be responding to anymore. Thank you for taking the time to watch this video and I will need to do a follow up in the future about the other issues surrounding BMI.

I once had a GP inform me that I was "obese" because of my BMI measurement. At the time I was training hard and lifting heavy weights, I was a UK size 6 and in no way "obese". I challenged this with the GP, but was informed that it still needed to be recorded as obese, even though he agreed I actually wasn't. As a person who had a former ED this was extremely unwelcome and unhelpful.

Yes! When I was a teen I had a sports physical for track and was told by my primary care Dr I needed to drop 5-10 to get to normal range as I was "overweight". I was and am a shorter female who has something similar to a gymnasts build. Spurred an eating disorder .... I ran track that year not any way fueling my body correctly. I am glad 20 years later all the health professionals in my life don't rely on BMI as a standard.

There is actually a guy that lost his leg up to his hip and his insurance sent a nurse to his house to find out why he was severely underweight! They apparently overlooked the lack of an entire leg.

"I have more issues than I know what to do with" (regarding the use of BMI, of course). I love that quote.😂

I feel so VALIDATED!!! I have had to go to the doctor a lot in the last couple of years so I get a printout of my visit. It always says "talk to patient about BMI" I work out 6 days a week and they go ahead and check my blood panel, and low and behold, it is stellar!! I get so discouraged and that they don't believe me, but then my blood work never lies!! Thank you for this, as always Justina!!!

Let's not forget that this guy who created the BMI chart wasnt a biologist, doctor, or anything relevant to the field of health and medicine. I currently powerlift and have always been physically active. I adore my now retired pediatrician for doing the eyeball test to go with the objective information. I was always classified as overweight and technically now obese by bmi but my blood panel is gorgeous. The one time a medical proffesional brought up my weight while talking about something off in my bloodwork without seeing me on a telehealth call I was very irritated. Turned out Im just that 10% of people that cant take a medication. Basically, I too hate BMI charts. Love this video.

Sam at every size made an amazing video about the history of the bmi that I highly recommend ❤️

Great video. It was super interesting to learn about the actual origins of BMI. When I was doing my high school physical years ago I was in the overweight category and my doctor told me and my mom that I needed to go on a diet. It really messed up my relationship with food. I don't remember what all he suggested, but I've always remembered that he told my mom that I needed to start drinking skim milk. Which, this doctor also once told my mom that he didn't consider potatoes a vegetable. 🙄

For me BMI was only another thing to monitor whether I was closer or further from the ideal body when I was a teenager. Even though I’d always been in the normal BMI range, there was always room for improvement. Like I didn’t want to be a 22, I wanted to be a 18,5 🤯

I have been told before that BMI isn't an accurate measure of health, but I never knew the details of why. I just know that it was slightly traumatizing to be told I was obese when I was a Freshman in High School when our PE class had us measure against the BMI. It wasn't until I was very much an adult that a healthcare professional told me that BMI was not an accurate way to measure health.

Love this Justina! Thank you so much for shedding light on BMI, especially when we have better markers of our health overall.

I used to follow a doctor on twitter who specializes in working with obese patients to lose weight. He said something that surprised me, that weight isn’t an indication of health. Overweight people could have low bp, cholesterol, etc. and normal weight people could be unhealthy with regard to their hearts. I have a healthy bmi, but I have high bp because of genetics. Eating healthy and exercising helps, but genetics and age will get you in the end!

I really like to „surprise“ ppl with the origins of BMI - and after that telling them the origins of 10k steps myth.😅😅😅

I've been in a calorie deficit for a year and am on mounjaro and see conversations on BMI in the online groups a lot. It's well known that body builders who are

As always: great content, Justina. Thank you!

New subscriber here, I’m really glad I found your channel! As someone who’s overweight and is hesitant to start a fitness journey, most channels and websites are typically fat phobic and kinda intimidating but you come off very educated and kind!

I've heard a ton of people say the same thing, and I think your message is sound! However, the angle is always presented as "it may be ok if you're overweight, because BMI doesn't account for muscle, frame size, bone density, etc." I've never been able to find answers on the underweight category. As a 5'4" woman, I fluctuate between 102 and 105lbs. That puts me in the "Underweight" category on a BMI scale. Is your opinion on BMI applicable to this category as well? If I feel healthy, have energy, and am eating sufficiently, do I need to gain weight purely to fit into a "normal" BMI category?

So what is the alternative? How will we evaluate people for not only everyday health but something like major surgery such as transplant medicine? You can't just take it away- you need something else in its place. BP, cholesterol, RHR doesn't give the picture of something like readiness for organ failure interventions and other critical medicine interventions. It's fine to say there are issues with BMI- I'd say that's obvious- but how will we indicate health regarding height/weight characteristics without it?

Thank you for making this video Justina. I'd like to add that BMI shouldn't be a measure of health because it totally misses mental health! It doesn't matter if my BMI is "normal", I am not and I do not feel healthy when my mental health is not in a good state.

BMI is a tool and it has its faults but it's still to this day an inexpensive and noninvasive technique for assessing the composition of the human body. People, mostly men, using it to oppress people AND its usefulness in healthcare environments are two differences conversations. It can be used by health specialists to undermine patients but it should never happen, anywhere. However, this does not mean that BMI should be discounted. BMI remains a useful measure for estimating risk of health outcomes in a population. I'm disappointed by the lack of research in this video. BMI can be used to ask social changes like better food policies or promotion of physical activities. It isn't made to bully individuals.

Follow most of your new videos and tend to enjoy them. Supposedly standing behind science yet not even being willing to say that it’s not just ‘people’ who menstruate is a sad joke. (Hopefully you’ve never thought of yourself as a feminist).

The issue is not BMI per se, but it’s misuse. It serves a function when looking at population trends e.g. if BMIs on a population level are rising it’s cause is unlikely to be an influx of bodybuilders to that country! On an individual basis it’s not particularly useful. Why is it used? Laziness - a simple calculation (however irrelevant) is preferred over blood work, blood panels etc. On a personal level, I find it annoying as it is also skewed against people like me who are “vertically challenged”. I mean I could alter my BMI by just getting taller, but aged 50 is a late growth spurt not a little optimistic? Also, can you put me down for a “I’m Not A Belgian Man!” sweatshirt from the merch range you’re now obliged to start? (Medium ideally, but I’ll accept a Small 😉)

What is sad is that I learnt about BMI in school and it was promoted as a measure of healthy weight.

Yes! Fascinating history lesson!

Great video! One topic I'd love to hear your thoughts on is using pre-workout in strength training. I'm so confused as to why you'd want to take so much caffeine or increase your heart rate (especially when you could do that with another workout instead?). It's just SO normalized across TikTok and Instagram and I don't understand it.

BMI is indeed a fascinating and DEEPLY frustrating topic 😂 I appreciate the reminder that it should not be hyper-fixated on! ❤️ I tend to slip into thoughts like “oh, what if I need to lose more weight?” because I’m still in a deficit. I’m in a zone where I’m doing really well, and trying to figure out when to be done with the deficit, so you can imagine the frustration of balancing all the deciding factors💩 especially when- according to the BMI- I’m pretty sure I’m still considered “overweight”, and that has such a negative connotation socially, so that can really mess with your head!

I always said BMI is BS. I have no idea how this came to be the accepted parameter. It's amazing we haven't come up with a better technique. Thanks as always for bringing common sense and facts to these issues.

I love your cat sweater. This is why I loved when I went to Curves. They did give a BMI number but they also had weight and measure each month and they would announce when we lost whether it was inches or weight and give incentives free tee shirts for every 100 workouts.

33 BMI obese chad reporting in ✔️

THANK YOU! ❤

SamAtEverySize has released a video about the history of the BMI two days ago. She actually has a background in history and the reason why the BMI is used is not as bad as it looks. (Adolf / Adolph / Adolphe was a totally normal man's name in the culture and time period. It came wildly out of fashion because of a certain someone about 80 years ago. But Quetelet died 15 years before that one was born.) Yes, the BMI is fuzzy, especially around the "normal" area. And it should not be used as more than a rule of thumb. But a person with a BMI of 14 or below is definitely so thin that they will become unhealthy soon if they haven't yet. And someone with a BMI of 60 or above definitely has too much body fat (which is not healthy). The big advantage of the BMI is that to collect the data for it, you need 1. a scale, and 2. measuring tape. Inexpensive, easy to use, quick, non-invasive, and widely available. You can even ask people who are surveyed by questionnaire to enter these data themselves because most people know this about themselves. How often do you have a blood panel done? Or a DXA scan? How many people own a blood pressure cuff or something that tells them their resting heart rate? All of them are incomplete data points in the full picture of health. So is the BMI. But because it is so cheap and easy, it can be used in many statistical analyses. I do know you mean well, but I have lately been hearing some things from you that I've exactly like this from Fat Acceptance people. These people want to deny that body size has any bearing on health whatsoever and video titles like "The BMI is trash and here's why" seemingly gives their "argumentation" more credibility. And that worries me.

As a math teacher, more specifically AP Statistics, the fact that BMI has been used for so long when it is clearly mathematically unsound (why in the world did he square height? Just because…?) and should not be applied to the general population based in the data it originated from, is pretty shocking. I had no idea it’s origins. As always, thank you for the information and thanks for giving me an interesting talking point for my stats students at breakfast tomorrow morning before their big test. 😊

If the BMI only took into account men from Belgium, why a few years ago the United States change the values ​​to make them coincide with those given by the World Health Organization? The BMI began with data only from European men but its study did not landed only there. This again sounds to me like rhetoric coming from the fat positive discourse. The BMI has many shortcomings, but here, in the middle of nowhere where I live, without too many resources, the BMI gives us an approximate idea of overall health. Every time we get close to the HAES it makes a lot of noise for me. Most people are not Bodybuilder, so, BMI it isn't so bad. I don't want to argue bc it is a lot of job to my brain to translate, but I also think that what some NASA scientists said in some videos I saw a few days ago is true: It is impossible to reproduce the mass of scientific knowledge with each new generation, what can be done is to take what has been done and generate modifications.

Okay from now on BMI stands for Belgian men index😅

I think people generally have an idea of if they are obese or not regardless of BMI. BMI is a quick assessment of where you "may" fall in terms of obesity etc. (I use this term lightly) from there other assessments need to be done to assess for other risk factors. I do believe the hip to waist ratio is a better indicator of "healthy" and rate of morbidity. I also believe BMI is dangerous as when I was in the throws of ANA, I used BMI to "qualify" me as underweight etc.....

Thank you because I used to be overweight and then lost a lot of weight to the point that I had to buy all new clothes. I went from a XXL to L and my nickname is slim to most of my friends and I just went to the doctor for a DOT physical and my doctor who treated me had the audacity to say I was overweight. WTF!

The thing that I've been genuinely curious about for a while is: why? Even if you didn't care *at all* about inclusivity, and were perfectly happy to be a fatphobic, medicalizing chauvinist, and wanted a relatively simple way of creating weight categories, why is THIS calculation still acceptable as even a back of the napkin categorization? It's so arbitrary and silly, not created to measure the thing it's measuring, skews weirdly with height increases for no specific reason, etc. In an age where in other areas of medicine we're using antimatter to image people's insides, harnessing RNA to deliver vaccines, and treating cancers with stem cells, why THIS silly formula that doesn't actually make sense? Couldn't the formula itself be adjusted to be based on something actually medical, and maybe add in a couple of other *easily obtainable* inputs as well? I mean we have a DSM-V by now, and that too is fraught with silliness, so why not regularly update the BMI formula (and no, not just change the meanings of the output values, but the actual inputs, weights, exponents)?

I learned a lot from this video, thanks! I definitely can see how the BMI (or something like the BMI) can be helpful, but based on its sample size (if that's even the right terminology) alone, I feel like it's pretty clearly flawed.

The clip you chose for Instagram, your third point, is SO good. Ever since you mentioned in a video a while back that a doctor said you should lose 5 pounds, I've been thinking about this. Five pounds?! Seriously? Even in an instance where fat loss might help someone with whatever condition they have, 5 pounds? Ok, so are doctors just recommending we go pee before we weigh ourselves or....? Ok, my rage is consuming me. Back to work.

Thanks for this, Justina!! The BMI has been discouraging for me in the past. I try not to pay attention to mine. Do you think waist to hip ratio is a better measure of health?

I think BMI is a product of a time when humans were at a completely different point. It gives a standardized, westernized view in ppl's bodies. Remember, it was created at a time and in a place where belgian ppl literally took african people in a zoo. No industrialisation yet, no two world wars. I think to this day, especially female bodies are not reseached enough. The idea of BMI is, to me, rooted in thia very early idea of the human body. I don't know why so many people get so heated over this in the comments. It's not that serious... I know so many strong healthy women who look completely normal and are considered overweight. If you don't see an issue, idk lmao

Good morning Justina. Excellent video with superb production values. I most certainly agree with you that BMI is trash. 👍👍

Well, I liked your use of "Origin Story." 😀

I'm a 29-year-old guy. My muscle mass is low. I was 130 LBs at 6'2" and my body fat then was not too low. I could not squat a 45-puond bar through full range of motion. From fall of 2020 to May 2022, I gained 30 pounds, and I was not working out, so none of it was muscle. At 160 LBs at 6'2", BMI says I'm normal. I'm not. My muscle mass is low and my bodyfat might be too high.

Thank you for inclusive language!! It means a lot!!

Hey, I have a curious question that I've tried to Google. Say what if you can't work out for a season due to injury or sickness. How much protein/what percentage of protein is the bare minimum needed to maintain your gains? I know eating enough calories is also a factor.

I really appreciate you trying to use inclusive language for folks of diverse gender!!! It really does look like your heart is in the right place

To be honest I'm a little surprised by this. I would have thought that you'd be the first person to point out: Most people aren't professional bodybuilders. Most people who watch your channel aren't. You usually emphasise that you are taöking about average americans. And I'd assume that the don't fall in the obese category because they have so much msucle mass. I might be wrong but I thought the BMI has continuously been studied. And reproduced. And developed. Who is using BMI as the only metric to measure someones health? This seems like a strawman argument to me.

Honestly someone who is bodybuilding is often not all that healthy anyway so there’s that. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle with BMI. On an individual level and dealing with someone who is average size or only a bit overweight, there are much better markers of health to look at, but dealing with people on the outskirts of the bmi scale (like very underweight and like I used to be at a BMI of 46) the health risks associated with bmi bears out no matter it’s origins from some old mathematician. So I agree it’s not something that should be used for people individually all the time as a direct measure of health but using it as a starting point to look at a snapshot of how someone is doing to work on further exploration of their health markers by better means, it’s not that big a deal imo. I also think on statistical and population levels, it also does a decent job predicting risk. It really needs to be left at a place of determination of risk based on population levels but also it’s problematic how insurance companies use it so strictly and our insurance and health system in the US is trash too so omg now I’m in the rabbit hole. Ugh. Lol So I agree but also I don’t think it’s fair to say it has no place when you consider how extreme obesity is becoming. I was someone in that realm of class 3 obese/morbid obesity before I lost over 100 lbs and gained some muscle. I was not at that bmi because I was muscular😂 Now I’m more lower end class 1 obese/almost overweight and there’s room for improvement but my other markers of health are much improved so I don’t stress about my BMI specifically and my doctor doesn’t either. More docs need to be like mine. I don’t care for how it’s weaponized or stigmatized with patients and medical professionals really do need to work on their bias there for sure. Those of us living with obesity deserve to be viewed as more than just a number for sure.

CAT sweaters rock🎉🎉🎉

THANK YOU!!!!!! I’ve been sharing the truth about BMI with people for so long and now I’m going to send this video to everyone😂😂

Hi Justina! Great video. I know this is an overlapping kind of touchpoint so if you feel you can’t really speak to it, no worries at all! I was just curious about your thoughts on individuals who classify as morbidly obese via the BMI chart but leverage the inaccuracies of its origin and question its place in healthcare to justify why being their size is ok and healthy when it potentially might not be. They tend to support Health at Every Size ideas and point to BMI’s questionable origins, further lambasting doctors for centering their high weight as the reason for most of the medical issues they are facing. I just am curious about this because since deciding to start taking my health seriously I’ve watched lots of videos waffling on this topic in particular and find it difficult to form any solid opinion on BMI and its usage. Also I definitely feel I’ve experienced tons of medical discrimination in my life because doctor’s always pointed to my weight as the main problem without looking further or taking me more seriously (IMO doctors should always look further) but I’m also understanding that weight can be a large, contributing factor to your overall health (also know your video is of the opinion that it’s not BMI specifically that’s the best marker of overall health). Anyway, thanks for reading this absolute essay of a comment and I hope you can respond!

In 2015-16, I had purposely lost about 30lbs by exercising consistently and eating better. I remember going to my annual doctor's visit and my doctor (who I had been seeing since I was like 10) told me that I was no longer overweight and in the normal BMI range... and I remember how happy it made me to hear that. I look back and even now that I'm 20lbs heavier, I would still be considered at the higher end of "normal." My blood pressure was always fine and other than hormonal migraines and UTIs, my overall health has been good. So in conclusion, BMI is stupid and this term shouldn't even be uttered by our doctors or any other medical professionals to us anymore. 🙃

Could you do a video about the hormone or metabolic approach to weight loss? I keep seeing ads targeting people who have ovaries to find my “hormone type” and lose weight. Is there any credibility to this?

Hello Justina, I have always been an enthusiast of your content and I will continue to be, obviously I like you a lot, to the extent What am I to say the bmi is trash ? It is just an uninformed way of putting this in a video, I am in my 4 year of studies as a dietitian at the university and the bmi is used for many more ways , that is a “health” factor, we use for calculation in parenteral nutrition, population statistics, epidemiology and at the end of the day this become a useful toll for many things and the weight is just the edge of the problem, as I said maybe you need a little more research on these because I know where we are going, but just is simple not true, sometimes we need more information than just a couple of papers.

I’d recommend Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia in order to further understand how racism intersects with the use of BMI and the origins of fat phobia.

OMG the sponsor BS is a turn off and a half