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Defining optimal body weightOptimal body weight, you might think, is what is presented to us by the images of bodies in the media - especially the glamor media. In our minds eye THAT is the ideal body image to be.It's only recently with the death of a too thin South American models in 2007 that the modeling industry is starting to take baby steps to rectify the blatantly unrealistic images we're constantly exposed to. And by the way - it doesn't end with too thin bodies to start with. Even these already underweight models still get touched up and thinned a little more. Sadly though, these images color our thinking - they become what we internalize as sexy, desirable and what to aim for as our ideal body weight. It's the way we have to be to be at our perfect body weight, or so we think.
Prince Charming will apparently swoop down in his lamborgini, choose us over the ugly others and take us in his ever-loving arms to his castle on the hill. Here, we'll have a never-ending supply of gowns and an invite to every desirable social event. And of course, this all means we live 'happily ever after." Pah! Those too thin models are some of the most insecure people I've ever worked with. And just because they're thin and apparently 'have it all' because of having the apparently ideal body weight, that's the illustion we buy into. The models I've met are diet and food obsessed, forever comparing themselves and finding themselves lacking. Their real lives are a far cry from the illusion their photographs present and they absolutely, categorically DO NOT not represent the ideal body weight for women. How do shop mannequins affect us?You know those shop mannequins we so often stop to admire?
Then horror of horrors - in the glass reflection you see yourself looking (by comparison) like an over-sized elephant. As with ridiculously thin models, what we're comparing ourselves to is too thin and flagrantly unrealistic. That's far from the ideal body weight to strive for. Insurance tables and optimum body weightFor years I lived believing that the insurance ideal as put forward by those height and weight tables were supposedly the body weight ideal for optimal health. Imagine my surprise to find I was wrong!In fact research has found that even if the optimal body weight is defined as the one that has the longest lifespan, then being up to 30% overweight outlives the insurance ideal. Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, believes that a BMI of 25 to 30 - roughly the so-called overweight range - may be the optimal body weight. To calculate your Body Mass Index or BMI divide your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in meters. Don't get stuck on numbersI don't want to get hung up on figures, because that means we usually get stuck obsessing about making them smaller. And the goal isn't to get thinner - it's to get healthier! Please dont' forget that.However, if you really simply have to have a figure to focus on, consider that percentage body weight is a better health indicator than height and weight tables or even the body mass index. Use our body fat calculator to figure your percentage body fat.
He tells the story about how, as a child, he always wished he could float and then one day as an adult he discovered he could - it was because he'd grown fatter. Instead of getting obsessed with figures. Lie in a swimming pool, floating on your back and exhale all the air in your lungs. The better you float the more fat you're carrying. Dr. Bailey reckons that if you sink you're probably somewhere near your optimal body weight. But just a word of warning here - women carry more fat biologically than men. I know it's unfair (who ever said life was fair) but it's almost as if women are born with an inbuilt tube that keeps them afloat. Because men have more muscle than women - they sink more readily.
Consider this for optimal body weightYour natural optimal body weight won’t necessarily match your so-called ‘goal weight’ but it will be a weight and shape that uniquely suits you. It's a size (and that can be any size) at which you feel alive, vibrant and healthy. Because one size really doesn't fit all.For more on the whole topic of ideal body weight and the research on it, click here Sadly though, so many of us, because we've been so brainwashed to believe that 'larger' is unhealthier, start telling ourselves stories about how unhealthy we feel because that's what we've heard we should feel so many times. But is it really? Read this obesity research and make up your own mind. In cultures where this isn't the predominant message, people feel vibrantly healthy and wonderful in their bodies at much larger sizes than those with Western body ideals. 
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So, here's what happens. You're walking along the sidewalk and stop to look at a shop window. Inevitably this this mannequin with it's supposed optimal body weight has a waist so small a child's hands can fit around it and alongside.
