00:03
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And one of the questions I ask most often, and yet immediately after asking it, I'm like, why did I do that? Is what's your goal weight? Like what number do you have in mind? Because immediately the response I get is the question back, well, what is my ideal body weight? And that's what I'm talking about today. This whole concept that there is a magic number for everyone.

00:32
and this is the ideal goal with which they should be working towards in terms of what they see on the scales. Now, pretty sure I don't need to tell you about the limitations of the scales, but I'll probably cover them anyway. And in fact, today I want to chat a little bit about firstly, the historical perspective of ideal body weight. Where does this term even come from? Like, is it health related? Is it aesthetic related? Like, what is its origins?

01:00
And then I want to chat about why BMI isn't the be all end all. You know why, but I'm just going to refresh you. And other metrics that you could use to determine whether or not you have reached a place which is supportive of your health in the long term. So it is way more than just the number that you see on the scales or you're a comparison against, you know, a chart or anything like that. So it's worth understanding why when you ask me that question,

01:28
back, you know, what's my ideal body weight? It's very difficult for me to tell you. Firstly though, I thought it was interesting to look at the historical context of ideal body weight and the origins are not rooted in health, they are rooted in insurance. So the concept of an ideal body weight began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, driven by life insurance companies, not doctors, especially the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

01:56
They collected data from policyholders to link weight and height to mortality risk, aiming to determine which body types lived longest, not necessarily who was healthiest. And I mean, with that does come, of course, many flawed foundations and biases. Measurements were often self-reported and taken over clothes. Frame size classifications were quite arbitrary in terms of how they were defined, using elbow breadth.

02:25
These tables shaped the ideal body weight norms despite poor methodology and heavy monetary bias. So underweight and overweight individuals paid more in premiums. And I know that this is something which health insurance companies today, some of them take into consideration using BMI, obviously still a flawed process. much

02:50
Contradictory research was ignored at the time, including studies showing no or inverse links between weight and mortality. BMI was first proposed by Adolf Quitlett in 1835 and it resurfaced in the 1970s as a simpler measure. The Fogarty Conference in 1973 linked ideal body weight ranges to Body Mass Index, or BMI, leading to the standard BMI cutoffs we use today.

03:20
Like ideal body weight, BMI became popular for population surveillance, but obviously not clinical precision. So despite their flaws, both ideal body weight and body mass index were adopted widely because they were quick, cheap, and easy, and they are still used to set eligibility for treatments such as bariatric surgery. I'm sure they're used in GLP-1 medication qualifiers as well.

03:47
to guide enteral and parenteral nutrition, so nutrition that you get through tubes, and to adjust mechanical ventilation settings and drug dosings, just so you know. It's also used to describe sort of a population weight status. And in that sense, something like a BMI can be quite helpful. Like if you can look at a population like New Zealand and assess changes in BMI classifications and say a shift

04:17
of that curve to illustrate more of the country has a higher BMI reflecting higher body mass and likely higher body fatness, then that is a useful thing to consider. But at, of course, at that individual level, it's just not precise because like ideal body weight, BMI does not reflect body composition, muscles versus fat, and of course,

04:46
bone density and the heaviness of bones, which we know differs in different ethnicities. It also doesn't consider genetics, lifestyle, metabolic health. We know that if people are metabolically healthy and active and their BMI plays less of a role in determining their overall health outcomes. And it's very much European measures that are used. And in New Zealand, we used to have different cutoffs for Maori and Pacific

05:15
populations, but they were scrapped and we would now, everyone in New Zealand is aligned with the World Health Organization definition for BMI, which is pretty inappropriate, particularly if you know that people of Maori and Pacific descent do have lower health risk at a higher given body weight. So these are just some of the sort of common limitations of broadly used markers for ideal body weight or

05:45
what we should be aiming for. We've also got that the predictive formulas such as Divine, Hamway and Robinson that are based on the flawed data from the metropolitan life insurance companies assume that weight increases linearly with height and we know that's not accurate. And of course you've got technologies like DEXA which absolutely offer better insights.

06:12
but of course these are expensive and less accessible. So while there are of course more personalized and precise tools for some people, for most of us actually, these are sort of out of the realm of possibility of using to sort of determine that we are at a healthy body shape and size for us. And this is one of the reasons why the idea of an ideal body weight has sort of moved out of favor in terms of a standardized number or

06:41
standardized parameters for individuals and experts now call for a shift to more realistic or functional body weight based on a person's unique physiology, lifestyle and health goals. And while that's all very well and good, it still doesn't give you any sort of parameters to hang your head on in terms of what to aim for with your ideal body weight. And that's something which I want to chat about now. So to sort of summarize on BMI, which is what we use,

07:09
what we often hear in digital media, or you might see that your doctor's office. And I know some doctors still use BMI charts and sort of say to their clients, say to their patients, need to lose weight. And I do actually hear some health professionals use it in relation to, you know, a sort of set number for people. And one of the qualifiers I often hear is that a BMI of 22 should be what people are aiming towards.

07:37
if they're not overly active. And then in my head, I'm like, well, if you're not overly active, maybe that's the recommendation, not some sort of BMI number, because 22 is sort of right in the middle of the 18.5 to 24.9 that is used to reflect a sort of a healthy weight BMI. But it is originally designed to assess population risk and not individual health. It doesn't account for muscle versus fat. It doesn't account for bone density, age, or even sex.

08:07
An athletic man or woman can be overweight by BMI standards, but clearly very healthy. You only have to look at rugby teams, CrossFit athletes, any sort of athletic person who carries a lot of muscle to see the difference between lean and fat. And someone with low muscle but high visceral fat might still fall into that healthy BMI category, which may give them false reassurance. So that's something else to consider.

08:37
but what do you wanna use instead? So here are some numbers that I have heard sort of put out there by other experts in the field of body composition, but also in terms of overall health markers. So percentage body fat is a good one. Now you do not wanna use your BIA machine or your fancy scales at home to determine this. Even using them as sort of trends on a month by month basis, it may tell you something.

09:04
but it just might not because it's so open to error in interpretation based on water regulation, quite frankly. You have to have all factors to be standardized in order to get as close a possible reliable number, much less an accurate number. So things like the same time of day, eating the same meal the night before, not having anything to eat before you get on the scales. But of course, know, emptying your bowels and going to the bathroom,

09:33
before jumping on the scales ideally. And because of the way that the body regulates water, things like inflammation, cortisol, hormones are likely to impact on how your body's holding water. So this is why I'm just not a fan of the BIA machines and it doesn't sort of matter really what they say. in fact, had a very, there was a very good discussion with the two Eric's on iron culture a couple of weeks ago about some of the limitations of

10:03
the at-home scales that measure percentage body fat. However, if you were somehow lucky enough to get an MRI done, a full body MRI, or even a DEXA, and I do think DEXAs themselves come with some inaccuracies as well, a healthy body fat range for a woman is about 18 to 26%. 18 is pretty athletic. And for men, it's 10 to 20%. And this will...

10:29
absolutely give you a clear picture of body composition and the scale alone. And a Dexamachine is probably what you'd use. And when I listened to conversations that I heard on iron culture from the two Erics, if I listened to the Lay Nortons and those people who work or who have worked in that physique space, then these are the numbers that I hear sort of bandied about, albeit competitors in the physique space. you know, clearly

10:57
they're going to be much leaner than what I'm, than my general, my gen pop numbers that I'm giving out here. And we do see increased health risk with numbers above sort of 30 % in women and above 26, 27 % in men. So it's worth understanding and knowing that. Now, another marker that can be used is something called the Appendicular Lean Mass Index, or otherwise known as ALMI.

11:26
And this measures muscle in the arms and legs relative to height. And it's a key marker for muscle mass and also risk of sarcopenia, which is that accelerated muscle and bone loss as we age. So the appendicular lean mass is the sum of lean mass excluding fat and bone in the arms and legs. It is measured by body composition tools, ideally by a DEXA, which is gold standard.

11:55
You can also get it done by BIA. It's widely used, but as I said, it's less accurate. If you get the same machine and they are professional machine at your gym or at your doctor's office, things like that, then it's likely to be more reliable though. Or of course you can do it through CT scan or MRI, which is highly accurate, but costly and rarely used clinically. But you'll often see this value output directly on a DEXA or a BIA report.

12:23
So you measure the ALM, you then measure height in meters. And the ALMI, the Appendicular Lean Mass Index, is the ALM divided by height squared. And you get a particular number. So let's say that someone's appendicular lean mass was 19.8 kilograms, that's the lean mass on their arms and legs, and their height is 170 or 1.7 meters.

12:50
then ALMI is 19.8 divided by 1.7 squared. And that ends up being 6.85 kilograms per meter squared. So it's a little bit like BMI in terms of what they're using, but they're not using weight. And clinical cutoffs for low, appendicular lean mass index using DEXA. For women, a low threshold is below 5.5. And for men, it's below 7.0.

13:18
and these caras are often used to diagnose sarcopenia or low muscle mass, especially in aging populations. Interestingly, DEXA clearly is preferred because it separates fat mass, bone mass and lean tissue, and BIA might overestimate ALM, especially if someone is over-hydrated or undernourished. And tracking ALMI over time is useful to monitor training effects. Are you getting more muscle?

13:45
aging or recovery from illness. And those last two are two contributors to losing muscle mass over time. So this is a really good measure of an appropriate amount of muscle mass for your sort of size and for your height essentially. And it's a little bit more detailed than just waist circumference and what the scales say. Having said that though,

14:12
waist circumference would be my third marker and a much more easy one to sort of get than a dexa probably. And it is a marker, it's a measure of visceral fat and is often used as a measure of visceral fat, which is the fat that we store around our organs and our abdomen. And it's more metabolically risky than fat elsewhere. And what I mean by that is just it is associated with more cardiovascular risk factors. It's more prone to an inflammatory response.

14:42
And generally speaking, it's the kind of fat that ideally we'd keep at a minimum. And whilst, of course, you can measure visceral fat, a waist circumference is often used as a proxy. Cutoffs are for women below 80 centimeters. And for men, it does vary. But the sort of the general cutoff for men is below 94 centimeters. And it's easy to track. And as I said, it's directly related to disease risk.

15:11
And so if you're in the process of a fat loss journey and you're wanting to use meaningful measures, then this is a really good one to target in addition to what you might see on the scale. And for what it's worth, most guidelines say a man's waist should be under 94 centimeters to reduce health risks, though those lower sort of 90 or 92 really does depend on ethnicity and context.

15:39
Something that is a little bit more precise than waste alone and is beginning to be used more in research circumstances is that waste to height ratio. This is personalized more to the individual and ideally the waste to height is of 0.5 or less is the number that we should be aiming for. Now what you might think at this point is well that is different from having this sort of blanket

16:07
woman below 80 and men below 92 or 94 or whatever it is. And you're right, there is some discrepancy there because a shorter person may need to aim lower than the 80 centimeters required to meet that waist to height ratio. And a taller person might have a perfectly healthy waist above that 80 centimeters. So waist to height is more flexible and is increasingly preferred, but you're going to see both of these recommended. So you can use both

16:36
together. If you're tall, waist to height might give you more room to move. But if you're short, then this keeps the target realistic. And one marker which I see mentioned, particularly in the menopause space, is waist to hip ratio. And we used to do this when I was studying my masters back in the late 90s, early 2000s. The reality is a waist to hip ratio is just not as accurate at determining risk as a waist to height ratio.

17:06
It's less reliable because it is hard to measure hips consistently. It doesn't distinguish subcutaneous from visceral fat. It's not widely used in research anymore despite people pushing it on social media. And waist circumference and waist to height ratios are simpler and they're stronger risk predictors. And if you think about it, if you were to begin a fat loss journey and you measured your waist to hip ratio, yet you lost fat

17:36
consistently and evenly across your body, you could weigh a lot less and be far healthier. Your waist to hip ratio, that ratio between the two might not actually change. So it isn't a good reflection of the progress that you have made. So keep it simple, use waist, use waist to height and be on your way. The last thing I will add is of course the scales are helpful and useful and I love them as well because they do tell you a lot about

18:06
how far you've come in the progress. And I don't think that we'll ever reach a point where they're not a useful tool in that. And if you are using the scales to determine progress, then you wanna be looking at 0.4 to 1 % body weight loss on average each week, but you're not gonna lose weight linearly, because that's not how it sort of works. And to come back to the initial question I sort of opened this podcast with,

18:33
What should you actually target? What is, how do you know your ideal weight on the scale? Actually triangulating your data, I think would really help you sort of determine what's best for you. So you've got the waist circumference or you've got the waist to height. You might've had an in-body done at the gym. So you have an idea of your appendicular lean mass in depth. And it may give you some insight as to how your body fat percentage is trending down.

19:02
Albeit you could actually get that measured actually just with skin calipers and a very experienced practitioner and that's probably one of the best ways to sort of measure your body fat percentage most accurate way. And I also like people to sort of to reflect on the process itself and not kill themselves to get to a particular number. And one of the reasons for this is body recomposition can happen across the fat loss journey depending on the individual.

19:29
someone can actually gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time and recomp their body without necessarily seeing a change in the scale. So their ideal weight might actually be a few kilograms higher than what they have in their head. I also like people to sort of, to yes, think about, you know, when they felt their best, but if when they felt their best was 20 years ago and they were at

19:56
a body weight that wasn't reflective of their current lifestyle now, where they're weights, where they might have, sorry, building muscle mass, where they may have had a couple of children or whatever, like, is that actually a realistic target? So we have to put these sort of other parameters around the numbers that I've given you. Also, we do know that regardless of starting weight, like you can really improve overall health markers with even a weight change of five or 10%. So,

20:24
You may have this number in mind, but if really you just want to live a happy, healthy lifestyle where you're fit, you're strong, you're capable, your metabolic health risk has reduced, that might not be this sort of magical number that gets you into size six genes, but you could be a hell of a lot happier and healthier, 10 kilos above that number and fighting fit. So you always want to put that real life context around whatever number that you sort of come up with.

20:53
And do know that if you have to kill yourself to get to a particular number, like I have people who are like, I'm just two kilos away and they're trying to restrict their food down further, their miserable, their sleep, their cravings, their hunger, their energy is all out of whack, then that's not their ideal body weight. So you have to put these sort of qualifiers over and above all of these numbers that I've given you. And also think about the genetic piece too. And I think about this a lot.

21:22
Like there are people, like every body is different. And for some people, their body naturally gravitates towards the upper end of that body fat percentage range. And then another individual may not be able to build muscle as easily as someone else. So have a look at your family and at the people, you know, your siblings, your parents, your grandparents, and have a think about their body type as well and how your ideals

21:50
reflect your genetics and where you come from because we might all want to have like, you know, be 18 % body fat with a huge appendicular lean mass index, but it actually might not be possible. And it might be possible for a short period of time, but it might not be realistic for the lives that we want to lead. So this is why, if you ask me, Mickey, what should my ideal body weight be and how will I know?

22:16
This is why it's not just sort of like a one sentence answer. You've got to layer on your lifestyle, your genetics, and this other information as well. So that's a lot that I think about when people ask me this. So that's why I thought I would just chat you through some of the things that I think about. There'll be other things that I've missed. There will be very good studies, I'm sure, that I am not even aware of that might even detail this out and go, actually, this is what you need to use.

22:44
But these are the things that I think about, the tools that are available if you want to go down that road. The last thing I will say is that the number that you reach on the scales at the end of your fat loss journey is not your ideal body weight. And that'll probably be the lightest number you will be because when you start eating at your maintenance calories again, that number will shift up because you've got more food on board, your glycogen, your muscle carbohydrate stores, which are typically depleted in a fat loss phase, they'll be restopped.

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and you just will not be that light. So just keep that in mind when you've got like a fat loss goal. Anyway, hopefully this was somewhat helpful. I will of course talk more about this in a couple of weeks time in my unlocking fat loss success webinar that is taking place late July. And you'll hear about that on my socials and my email and of course on the website. So hit me up with your thoughts on this. I'm over on Instagram threads and X @MikkiWilliden

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Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition, head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com and book a call with me to discuss this further. All right team, you have the best week. See you later.