BMI Baby!

BMI Baby!

Not the budget airline, but Body Mass Index. We have heard a lot about this measure and the use that doctors make of it as an indicator of general health. Basically, if your BMI is too high it’s not healthy so lose some weight! Fair enough. But what is a BMI? What is your BMI? What is my BMI?

Wikipedia describes the Body Mass Index thusly:

‘Body mass index (BMI) is a value derived from the mass (weight) and height of a person. The BMI is defined as the body mass divided by the square of the body height, and is universally expressed in units of kg/m2, resulting from mass in kilograms and height in metres.

The BMI is a convenient rule of thumb used to broadly categorize a person as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese based on tissue mass (muscle, fat, and bone) and height.’

Fortunately, you don’t have to work out your own BMI using the calculations above, you can use an online tool like this one. Once you have loaded your personal details and the website has done the calculations, you will have a value for your BMI. This will then place you in a category, and then based on that category you might be told that you need to lose some weight or maybe even gain some weight. Underweight is a thing too!

However, things are not quite that straight forward. The BMI as an indicator of health is rather crude. According to Professor Taylor it is a useful measure on a population level so that if the BMI of a large group of people increases, then the chances are that the incidence of Type2 diabetes (and I guess other metabolic conditions) will, inevitably, increase. However, BMI is not necessarily as useful for individuals. Visit any professional rugby team’s website and you will find the height, weight and age of the players. Put these numbers through an online BMI calculator and you will see that high performing, elite athletes can often fall into the obese category. Instead of BMI, Professor Taylor talks about an individual’s ‘Fat Threshold’, beyond which fat can no longer be stored safely by the body.

When someone’s stored fat is beyond the safe threshold, fat is stored in places that can cause health issues, for example when it is stored within the liver and the pancreas. Each person’s threshold is different. Some can store a lot of fat safely under the skin, while others cannot and it is deposited around and inside the organs. This is why the BMI is not all that reliable. 

What can you do about this extra fat that is dangerously stored in the wrong places, the surplus fat that is stored beyond your body’s Fat Threshold?  Well, it comes back to the fifteen kilogram weight loss again.

“As a rule of thumb, decreasing your body weight by 15kg (about 2st 5lb) will correct the excess of fat. It is the same whether you weigh 80kg or 160kg, as this is highly likely to take you below your Personal Fat Threshold.”

Taylor, Professor Roy. Life Without Diabetes: The definitive guide to understanding and reversing your type 2 diabetes . Short Books. Kindle Edition. 

Professor Taylor’s book is all about reversing Type 2 diabetes. However, Michael Mosely in  The Fast 800 diet book lists a number of other health benefits that rapid weight loss can achieve.

• To lose fat, fast: And, contrary to what we are often told, losing weight fast doesn’t mean you will put it back on again, even faster.  

• For general health and to live longer, as well as for the sense of well-being and increased energy it brings 

• For metabolic reasons, such as improving blood sugars, reversing and preventing diabetes, reducing blood pressure, improving cholesterol and lipid profile, reversing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), reducing risks of coronary artery disease and strokes, reducing the risk of dementia (known also as Type 3 diabetes), reversing polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), as well as improving the chance of conception in obesity and reducing the risk of diabetes in pregnancy.  

• To power up your brain: 

• To boost your mood and motivation: Eating a diet containing lots of junk or processed food leads to much higher rates of depression.  

• To help reduce inflammation in the body, leading to improvements in conditions such as arthritis, asthma and psoriasis, as well as reducing the risk of some cancers.

Bailey, Dr Clare. The Fast 800 Recipe Book: Low-carb, Mediterranean style recipes for intermittent fasting and long-term health (p. 17). Short Books. Kindle Edition. 

Missing from Michael Mosley’s list above is the fact that losing this weight will help me avoid any serious health complications should I catch Covid-19. So it is clear, for many different reasons, losing the weight is a very good thing indeed. Twenty pounds to go!

The books by Professor Roy Taylor and Michael Mosley are really very good reads. They are informative, easy to follow and lay out the various plans and diets clearly. Michael Mosley’s Fast 800 Recipe book is available at just 99p for the Kindle edition. 

So, how did the second week go?

Below is the list of what I consumed.

Tuesday -  Exante banoffee pie shake, chicken and leek soup, homemade broccoli and leek soup with poached eggs.

Wednesday - Exante honeycomb shake, exante dal pot, homemade broccoli and leek soup with cheese and ham.

Thursday - Exante shake, Exante soup, Sambar with cauliflower rice

Friday - Exante Caramel Biscuit Shake, Exante pot dal, cheese and ham omelette

Saturday - Exante shake, pot daal, sambar with tomatoes and broccoli

Sunday - Scrambled egg with mushrooms, PHD diet whey protein shake, bass fillet with sauce vierge

Monday - Exante shake, Exante soup (didn’t eat it), salmon with Asian Cabbage

I stayed within the 800 calorie limit every day. Again, the homemade food was the best food I had, but, again, the shakes and meal replacements are very convenient. I still like the shakes, but the soup I’ve gone right off. Far too sweet. I haven’t had any more Shepherd’s pie, my previous post will probably explain why. The Exante pot dal is still in favour and continues to be a lunchtime option. And at the weigh in? During the second week I lost a further six pounds which made a total of thirteen pounds in two weeks. Tidy!

In other news.

I have increased my activity levels! Good for me, eh? At the weekend I played a round of golf and cycled 50kms.

The golf went well. I hit many balls, some in the right direction, some just didn’t want to cooperate at all. I forget the result.

Cycling is better downhill than it is uphill.

But it all did me the world of good.