Dr. Madelyn Fernstrom offers her thoughts on the whether weight or BMI is really the most important factor in determining good health:
........Maybe an important area to revisit is just how we determine "obesity". For many years, it was the eyeballing approach - do I "look" fat, or "feel" fat, or have health problems which seem to accompany extra weight? Multiple large scale studies have strongly linked increasing weight with increasing health risk. This has been based on body mass index or BMI (What's your BMI?), a term linking height and weight for a single number used as the marker comparing weight and likelihood of diseases (like high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol). Your BMI translates in number that classifies you as healthy, overweight, and obese. You don't have to look particularly "heavy" to be classified as medically obese. In fact, many "overweight" folks agree they want to "lose a few pounds", but don't feel this is a health issue, since they have no medical illness related to their weight.
