You Can

Achieve a Healthy Weight

What Does it Mean to Be a Healthy Weight?

The association between health and weight goes beyond the bathroom scale. It’s not just about how you look in the mirror or being skinny. Achieving a healthy body weight is associated with reducing the risk of weight-related illnesses and health issues. Your scale can help you monitor your weight, but it doesn’t tell you if you’re healthy or not.

There are a variety of factors that influence whether your body weight falls within a healthy range, including:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Height
  • Genetics
  • Body shape
  • Underlying medical conditions
  • Lifestyle and dietary habits
There’s no ideal body weight for all people, it varies from person to person. To fully assess the weight range that’s healthiest for you, start with your primary care provider.. They will take your medical history and current health needs into consideration. They may also consider these key components – your waistline measurement, body mass index (BMI) and your body shape/body fat distribution.

Understanding BMI

Body mass index (BMI) is a common tool used to provide a rough measure of your body fat. Your BMI is calculated by dividing your weight (in kilograms) by the square of your height (in meters), or by using an online calculator.

For adults, BMI is categorized into standard weight status classifications. These calculations are the same for all adults regardless of body type or age:

BMI WEIGHT STATUS
Below 18.5 Underweight
18.5 – 24.9 Healthy Weight
25.0 – 29.9 Overweight
30.0 and above Obese
While this gives you a bit more information about your health status than your weight alone, it’s important to look at your BMI in the context of your overall body and health picture. People who are very physically fit — such as bodybuilders — can have obese BMIs. This is because they have excessive amounts of intramuscular fat, a type of fat that is not dangerous to heart health. Their elevated level of regular physical activity trumps an “unhealthy” BMI.

On the other hand, people with exceptionally low muscle mass, who aren’t physically active and have some extra weight around their midsection, may have a healthy BMI. These people are at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease because they’re carrying visceral (belly) fat and they’re not moving their bodies regularly.

Healthy habits are lifelong behaviors, not one-time events. Make your future a healthy one and schedule follow-up care with your primary care provider.

How Extra Weight Impacts Your Heart

Excess pounds do more than increase your weight, they are also strongly associated with common health problems that increase the risk of heart disease, including:

Being overweight increases inflammation and changes your body’s metabolism, both of which are counterproductive in maintaining your health. Carrying extra pounds also puts added strain on your heart. It has to pump harder to send blood to the extra body tissue. Over time, this increased need for extra blood supply affects cardiac efficiency and can cause damage to the arteries.

Why Your Waist Size Matters

Your waistline measurement can be used to help determine your healthiest weight range as it takes into account the distribution of fat in your body. There are several different types of body fat and they’re not all created equal. Each fat type serves a different role, some promote healthy hormone levels, while others lead to serious diseases.

The fat around your belly is called visceral fat, it carries more cardiovascular risk than other types of fat because it surrounds all your major organs and is highly inflammatory.

Having excess visceral fat can lead to obesity-related health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke, coronary artery disease and some types of cancer. You can be at an increased risk of developing these diseases if you are:

We have weight loss programs and medical experts in place to help you reach your healthy weight goal. To learn more about our weight management program, click a button below.

Top 3 Recommendations to Reduce Weight

  • Log your food – Keeping track of your food is so illuminating. We do so much incidental eating without thinking about it – walking by, grabbing this or that, just a nibble here or a small bite there. Making yourself accountable for what you put in your mouth, including frequency and portion size, goes a long way in losing weight and keeping it off.
  • Just move – You don’t need to do a boot camp or crazy fitness routine to make an impact. However, you do need to stop sitting around and start moving. Set yourself up for success with small weekly goals and build up to a regular exercise regimen. It’s not about how hard you work out, it’s about being consistent.
  • Manage stress – Stress has a detrimental effect on your mental and behavioral health. When you’re feeling stressed or bogged down, it’s easy to resort to mindless eating or high carb snacks. Keeping track of how you’re feeling in your food journal will help you identify stress triggers or eating disorders.

 

The important thing to remember is that even though your weight is a factor in your health, your weight alone does not determine your overall health.

Need Help?

Are you ready to start your weight-loss journey but not sure how? The St. Elizabeth Weight Management Center offers medical and surgical weight-loss programs to help you be the best, healthiest version of yourself that you can be. For more information or to schedule an appointment, call (859) 212-4625 (GOAL).

You Can Be a Healthier You

Call Us

For more information about Take Time for Your Heart or other Heart & Vascular Prevention and Wellness services, call
(859) 301-WELL (9355) today.