Instead of Body Mass Index (BMI), Use THIS...

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2023

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Let’s talk about the problems with using BMI (body mass index) as a weight or health measurement.

One of the biggest problems with BMI is that it doesn’t tell you how much fat you have versus muscle. It also can’t give you much of an idea of what's going on with your overall health.

Other common measurements:

• BMR (basal metabolic rate): Measures how fast you’re burning calories

• TDEE (total daily energy expenditure): Measures the quantity of energy being burned

• Keto calculator: Measures BMR and TDEE and can tell you how many calories and how many macronutrients you should consume in a day based on your BMR and TDEE

Many times, people look at how much weight they lose per week as a measurement of how healthy their metabolism is. However, this isn’t a good idea.

A big principle to consider is: get healthy to lose weight—don’t lose weight to get healthy. In the process of exercising and getting healthy, you’re going to gain muscle.

Muscle is heavier than fat. This means that some weeks you may not lose any weight, but your clothes are still going to feel more and more loose.

Instead of a BMI test, there are many other helpful tests you can do to help measure your overall health.

One of the best assessments of overall health is the metabolic test. This test can look at your metabolic pathways in real-time. It can provide great data to help professionals understand what could happen down the road, so you can do something about it now.

Keto Calculator

Transcript

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0:00.0	I want to talk about the number of problems with something called BMI, body mass index.
0:06.5	This is an index to help someone identify if they're underweight, if they're normal weight,
0:11.2	or if they're overweight, or obese. But there's quite a few problems with this
0:16.9	measurement that I want to discuss today. One of the biggest problems about this BMI is that it doesn't
0:21.4	tell you how much fat you have versus muscle because let's say for example
0:26.5	you're an athlete with a lot of muscle right you're going to register as being either overweight or
0:32.4	obese because it doesn't tell the difference between the two.
0:36.1	So that's a big problem.
0:37.5	It also doesn't tell the difference between you being healthy or unhealthy. There are people that are overweight but are healthy
0:47.2	metabolically, you know, they're metabolically flexible, which means they can handle
0:51.8	certain carbohydrates much better than other people.
0:54.9	So BMI is not a good test for whether someone's healthy or not.
0:59.6	Now another test that could be done using a certain calculated equation is bmr which is
1:06.6	basal metabolic rate this is a fairly decent test to help you measure how fast
1:12.3	you're burning calories. And then you have something called
1:15.8	TDE, which stands for total daily energy expenditure. So, BMR measures the rate at which you burn energy, but the TDE measures the quantity
1:29.2	of energy being burned.
1:31.1	And then there's something which I like called the kido calculator, which also looks at
1:35.8	b-m-r and t-d-de-e together with several other factors. And I'll tell a person how many calories
1:44.4	they should be consuming in a given day.
1:46.4	How many macro nutrients, proteins, fats,
1:51.0	carbohydrates, they should consume in a given day, based on their basic metabolic rate and the total energy
	...

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