How Much You Should Weight for Height and Age

Being underweight or overweight can pose significant health risks in the long run. Find out how much you should weight for your height and age to stay healthy.

Keeping a healthy weight for your height is important to lower your mortality risk and stay fit. Find out what are the most important ways to answer the question "How Much Should I Weight?".

Ideal Weight for Height and Age

Children have their own system of ideal weight, but for adults (over the age of 20), the most important tools to determine the right weight include the BMI (Body Mass Index), Waist to Height Ratio and Body Fat Percentage. The later is the total sum of essential fat and storage fat divided by your total weight. While you need a medical expertise to determine it, you should keep in mind that women with a Body Fat Percentage of over 31% are either overweight or possibly obese, while the same is true for men with a fat percentage over 25%.

How Much Should I Weight? - BMI

The Body Mass Index, your weight in relation to your height, is the most rudimentary form of determining healthy weight. You can find plenty of ways to calculate it online, but keep in mind that it doesn't take into account bone density or the waist, chest and hip measurements, which are also important clues for the answering the question "How Much Should I Weight?".

People with a BMI of less than 18.5 are considered underweight, while the ideal BMI is considered between 18.5 and 25. A value between 25 and 30 usually means you're overweight, while anything over 30 means obese.

Waist to Height Ratio

Determining the ideal weight for height and age should also take into account the waist to height ratio, that's a bigger clue for predicting future risk of diabetes and heart disease.

According to findings by Dr. Margaret Ashwell, presented at the 19th Congress on Obesity in Lyon, France (2012), keeping your waist circumference to less than half your height can help increase life expectancy for every person in the world.

Ideal Weight by Height: The National Institutes of Health System

Another way to determine the right weight for your height comes from the NIH experts who say women should start with an equivalency of 100 pounds of body weight for the first 5 feet of height. For each additional inch of your height, you should add 5 pounds to calculate your ideal weight.

Charts

If you're still not completely clear on how much you should weight, take a look at these simple charts created by wellsinceyouasked.com, based on the ideal weight for height principles accepted by the international medical community.