Am I Overweight

The yes is the least useful thing on this page

You asked a yes or no question and the tool gave you a yes or no answer. Fair enough. But of the three or four things on that results panel, the yes is the one worth the least, and we would rather tell you that than let you walk away with only it.

Look at what else it gave you. A BMI figure. The healthy weight range for your height. And, if you fell outside that range, a number: how far outside. Something like "you are about 3.7 kg above the healthy maximum".

That last one is the useful thing, and it is useful precisely because it is not a label. "Overweight" is a category you have been sorted into, and categories invite you to feel something. "3.7 kg above the range" is a distance, and distances invite you to do something. It is also, notably, a much smaller and less frightening thing than the word implies. A great many people who get a yes from this tool are a few kilograms outside a range whose upper edge is somewhat arbitrary anyway.

So read the gap, not the verdict. And then read the rest of this page, because there is a decent argument that the question you asked is not quite the right question, and a better one is available for the price of a tape measure.

Overweight. Over what, exactly?

It is worth pulling the word apart, because it smuggles in an assumption nobody examines.

Overweight means over some weight. Over which one? Not over your ideal weight, because as our Ideal Body Weight Calculator explains at length, the formulas that produce "ideal" weights were invented by pharmacists to calculate antibiotic doses and were never meant to tell a healthy person anything. Not over what you weighed at 22. Not over what you would like to weigh.

Over a BMI of 25. That is the whole of it. A statistical line drawn across a smooth gradient, chosen because that is roughly where population-level risks begin to climb, and applied to you as though it were a wall you had walked into.

Two things follow, and they cut in opposite directions, so we will give you both.

The first: the line is soft. Nothing happens to you at 25.1 that was not happening at 24.9. Risk rises gradually, and the further above the line you are, the more it means. Someone at 25.4 and someone at 34 have both been handed the same yes, and their situations have very little in common. The category flattens a gradient into a switch, and the gradient is the truth.

The second, so we are not accused of being comforting rather than honest: the gradient is real. The risks that arrive with sustained excess weight, particularly around the middle, are genuine and well documented. Being just over the line is not a problem. Drifting steadily further over it across a decade is how most people end up somewhere they did not intend to be. The line is not a wall, but it is a useful thing to notice you have passed.

What the tool actually did

No mystery here. It calculated your BMI, which is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared, then checked it against the standard adult categories.

Take someone 175 cm tall weighing 80 kg. 1.75 squared is about 3.06, so:

BMI = 80 ÷ 3.06
BMI ≈ 26.1

That lands in the 25 to 29.9 band, so the answer is yes, they are in the overweight range. The tool then works out the healthy range for that height, which runs from about 57 kg to about 76 kg, and reports the gap: roughly 3.7 kg above the top of it.

Notice the arithmetic in the example. The word says "overweight". The number says 3.7 kg, which is one decent grocery bag. Those are the same fact described two ways, and one of them is considerably easier to do something about than the other.

One honest note: the categories are for adults. They do not apply to children, who are assessed against growth charts for their age and sex, so use our Child BMI Calculator for those. They do not apply in pregnancy either.

A tape measure answers your question better than this did

Now the part that undercuts our own tool, which we think is worth saying anyway.

What you actually wanted to know was probably not "which side of a statistical line am I on". It was closer to "is my weight a problem for my health". Those sound like the same question. They are not, and BMI is markedly worse at the second one than at the first.

The reason is that BMI knows two things about you: your height and your total mass. It has no idea what that mass is made of or where you keep it. A muscular person and a sedentary person of identical height and weight get identical answers, which is silly. And a person carrying their weight around their middle and a person carrying the same weight on their hips get identical answers too, which matters far more, because those two people do not have the same risk at all.

The measure that does see this is your waist relative to your height, and the evidence behind it is strong. A meta-analysis of 78 studies covering over 300,000 adults found it outperformed BMI for identifying cardiometabolic risk, and the UK's clinical guidance body now recommends using it in primary care. The rule fits in a sentence: keep your waist to less than half your height.

So if this page told you yes, the genuinely useful next step is not a diet. It is our Waist to Height Ratio Calculator and a tape measure. If your waist is comfortably under half your height, the yes you just received deserves considerably less weight than the word implies. If it is not, then you have learned something the scale could not tell you, and it is the thing worth acting on.

If the answer was yes

Three things worth knowing, in the order they are useful.

You do not have to reach the healthy range to get most of the benefit. This is the finding people most need and least often hear. Research following thousands of adults through weight-loss programmes found that losing 5 to 10 percent of starting body weight produced clinically meaningful improvements in blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol. For our 80 kg example that is 4 to 8 kg, which as it happens would already put him back inside the range. For someone much further out, it is a fraction of the distance and still delivers most of the measurable gain. Our How Much Weight Should I Lose page goes into the evidence.

Slowly. A modest deficit works better than an aggressive one, is easier to live with, costs you less muscle, and is much more likely to still be happening in six months. Our Calorie Deficit Calculator explains why, including why the first fortnight will flatter you and the third month will not.

And it is one number among many. Your blood pressure, your blood work, your fitness, whether you smoke, how you sleep and your family history all matter, several of them more than this does. A doctor can see all of that at once. A web page can see your height and your weight. If your number worries you, the conversation is worth more than the calculator.

Questions people ask

What BMI counts as overweight?

25 and above, up to 29.9, with 30 and above classed as obese. Below 25 and at or above 18.5 is the healthy range.

I lift weights and it says I am overweight. Is it wrong?

Very likely, yes. BMI cannot tell muscle from fat, so it routinely misclassifies muscular people. Check your waist against your height instead; that is the measure that can tell the difference.

Does the line depend on my background?

It does. The evidence shows weight-related risk appears at lower BMI values in people of Asian descent, and several countries use an overweight threshold nearer 23 for that reason. Our BMI Calculator covers this. Waist-to-height ratio sidesteps the issue entirely, since one boundary works for everyone.

I am barely over the line. Does it matter?

Barely, if at all. The line is a boundary drawn across a gradient, and the gradient near 25 is shallow. What matters more is the direction you are travelling and where you carry it.

Does it change with age?

The categories do not, since they use height and weight only. There is reasonable evidence that a slightly higher BMI is not harmful and may even be protective in older adults, so past about 65 the upper line is worth reading generously.

References

Where the figures come from. The adult BMI categories are the standard classification published by the CDC, following the World Health Organization. The evidence that losing 5 to 10 percent of body weight produces clinically meaningful improvements comes from Wing and colleagues' analysis of the Look AHEAD study. The finding that waist-to-height ratio outperforms BMI as a screening tool for cardiometabolic risk is Ashwell, Gunn and Gibson's meta-analysis of 78 studies. The lower risk thresholds for Asian populations were set out by a WHO expert consultation in The Lancet.

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Body Mass Index (BMI). https://www.cdc.gov/bmi/about/
2. Wing RR, Lang W, Wadden TA, et al. Benefits of modest weight loss in improving cardiovascular risk factors in overweight and obese individuals with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2011;34(7):1481-1486. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3120182/
3. Ashwell M, Gibson S. A proposal for a primary screening tool: keep your waist circumference to less than half your height. BMC Medicine. 2014;12:207. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4223160/
4. WHO Expert Consultation. Appropriate body-mass index for Asian populations and its implications for policy and intervention strategies. The Lancet. 2004;363(9403):157-163. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(03)15268-3