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Simple Effective Weight Loss Short Articles on Weight Loss |
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What is "Ideal Body Weight"?Most people find "Ideal Body Weight' frightening because they believe it's "impossible to reach". This is wrong -- it's not at all impossible to reach.. But what is Ideal Body Weight and how do you know what yours should be? The standard "Ideal Body Weight" (IBW) Tables are not a perfect measure of your best weight -- and you can easily find any number of "specialists" who will point out both real and imagined flaws. But despite the (real) flaws, IBW tables are generally considered a pretty good approximation of your "healthiest weight" because they are based on direct measurements of huge numbers of people. Proposed "alternate methods" are often shown to have their own flaws usually ranging from equally great to much worse. (See below). Click here for the standard Ideal Body Weight Table [Use browser "back button" to return here.] An excerpt from The Multi-Diet: "Ideal Body Weight” (IBW) is a term that stands for the weight at which you
can statistically be expected to live the longest and be in the best health
while you are alive (other things being equal). Intuitively, this is a pretty
satisfying definition of the term “ideal”.
"The idea that good health and weight are related is not seriously questioned by anyone (although specialists still squabble over many of the details of the relationship.) "The three largest and statistically most powerful 'recent' studies of the weight-health relationship all demonstrate two things:
"The three studies referred to above are the 1959 Build and Blood Pressure Study (4.9 million people studied), the 1979 Build Study (4.2 million people studied), and a 1979 American Cancer Society study (750,000 people studied). "These studies have great 'statistical power' due to the huge numbers of people in them. Other studies using only small numbers of people have often been shown to lack the statistical strength required to detect true associations. "You may have heard vague rumors that 'the studies' have 'all been proven
wrong'. As usual, this rumor is itself “a ‘fragment of fact’ in ‘a bushel of
blather’ creating ‘a carload of confusion’”
"In 1987, Walter Willett and a highly respected group of researchers analyzed the 25 major prospective studies which had been done up to that time on weight and longevity. They reached the following three conclusions:
"For this reason, The Multi-Diet uses data from the 1959 Metropolitan Life Tables as the best available (though still not perfect) approximation of 'Ideal Body Weight'".
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