"Healthy Weight Range"

Finding a healthy weight range for you and your body type is one of the very best things you can do toward enjoying a life full of good health.

The importance of achieving and maintaining the ideal body weight simply cannot be emphasized enough as it is the foundation of overall physical wellness.

Scientific studies have routinely linked obesity to a number of conditions and diseases, some of them rather serious such as diabetes, heart attack, or stroke and many of us are sadly learning the dire consequences of following a poor diet and leading a sedentary lifestyle firsthand.

Rather than relying on a few outward clues such as appearance or clothing size, there are some criteria you will want to keep in mind when it comes to determining your healthy weight range for your age, height, and body type.

Naturally, people with larger frames who are taller with bigger bones will have a higher weight range than their smaller or shorter counterparts.

You can easily determine your frame size by measuring the circumference of your wrist.

For women of average height between “5'2 and 5'5” tall, a six inch wrist size indicates a small frame while six and one quarter inches is considered medium and anything over that size for a large frame.

For men over 5'5 tall, a wrist size of five and a half to six and a half inches indicates a small frame while medium is six and a half to seven and a half and large is anything over seven and a half inches.

In addition to gender and frame size, your healthy weight range for your specific body frame should also be determined by factors such as your height, your waist-to-hip size ratio, your BMI or Body Mass Index number, and even your ethnicity as most who are of Asian descent may have a lower recommended target weight.

Before the advent of using BMI to gauge one's ideal body weight, a standard calculation using height, which varies slightly between males and females, was employed.

For men, allow 106 pounds for the first five feet with six pounds added per extra inch. For women, allow 100 pounds for the first five feet with five pounds added per additional inch. Based on this generic formula, a 5'4 tall woman should ideally weigh approximately 120 pounds while a 6' tall male should weigh about 178 pounds.

Once you know your ideal weight, remember that being within a healthy weight range does not always equate with good health and therefore shouldn't be used as a false sense of security.

There are many people who are thin and seemingly fit; however, they may not be eating a diet of nutritious foods filled with vitamins and minerals or getting enough physical activity.

So, while their body weight may be within the “normal” limits numerically speaking, they aren't necessarily any healthier or at less of a risk of facing serious health problems than their heavier counterparts.

Look to your ideal weight as a goal while remembering the incredibly important role good nutrition and exercise play in overall health.

Go to maintaining a healthy weight from Healthy Weight Range