I have already talked about it many times, but since every now and then someone accuses me of writing too short articles on topics that instead deserve a few more lines, well, I go back to talking about the body mass index, which is one of the main reasons why many people become obsessed with the scales and think in kilos more or less and not healthy.

BODY MASS INDEX

The body mass index is in fact also called the Quetelet index, from the name of its inventor, who developed it from 1830 to 185o. We are therefore talking about an almost two centuries old formula , through which we determine not only if we are underweight or overweight, but also if there are risks or not for our health. The body mass index is in fact a number that is obtained by dividing our kilos by the square of our height. A calculation that you can all make, but which alas only partially describes both your physical state (whether you are fit or not) and your state of health. As personal trainer Michael Matthews (whose BMI defines him as an overweight man ) writes, where his percentage of fat mass is 8%), from the formula of the body mass index we then came to think that the BMI could be a good parameter to evaluate how thin or fat a person was. We owe this generalization to none other than Ancel Keys: the one who theorized the Mediterranean diet and the relationship between fat and cholesterol in his famous study on the seven countries, renamed the index of the Belgian mathematician Quetelet as Body Mass Index and used the parameters of underweight / overweight to set weight and health standards for insurance companies . In 1972, Keys finally proposed using body mass index to determine how overweight a person is.
So, when you think in terms of your ideal weight, ideal weight and BMI, know that you are a bit of a victim of a standardized insurance system. Let’s break a spear: Keys himself admitted that being overweight indicated in the body mass index was not necessarily synonymous with excess body fat.

So it’s not entirely our fault that we give so much importance to this number and our weight , the only parameter of the two that we can try to control. And so many people think only in terms of scales. Gain weight, lose weight… Yes, but what does that weight refer to? Is it fair to say that every time the balance goes up it is because we are fat?