Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by BMI.

Spoiler alert: all humans have.

Chances are if you live in a bigger body then you’ve been haunted by this chart more than a few times. I’m here to unpack this 200 year old bogus health hack and go over the top 3 reasons why this chart should be tossed out for good.

So why should we set this chart on fire? We are going to dive a little deeper into my top 3 reasons, but one of the major reasons every human should care about this is because our medical system uses this outdated math problem to discriminate about who should receive medical care.

It creates arbitrary categories that could one day affect you or someone you love.

I have a dozen personal experiences with BMI, but the one that sticks with me the most is when I tried to join the Coast Guard. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money and I thought joining the Coast Guard would be a great way to take advantage of the GI Bill and get some of my college paid for. I was a competitive swimmer and good athlete so I met with a recruiter. They went over the basic fitness requirements and I could crush all the categories. I was motivated, strong, and would have no problem meeting all the requirements. But the BMI requirement for women my height meant I needed to weigh 160lbs. I tried everything to get down to that weight, even some pretty toxic eating habits, and after a year of trying, I let go of that plan.

Like I said, BMI sucks.

But just how much does it suck? Let’s go over my top 3 reasons:

#1: It was created by a mathematician

In the 19th century, the US Government wanted a way to quickly calculate the degree of obesity in order to allocate resources. It was never meant to determine the level of fatness of an individual or give any information about the health status of a person.

In fact, the person who created the formula explicitly stated it should not and could not be used to determine individual levels of fatness.

It was meant as an AVERAGE over an entire population, not as a determinant of individual health. Moreover, the mathematician took the overall data and THEN applied a formula that fit it, and not the other way around. This is just poor statistics

# 2: It has no physiological basis

The categories are separated by a decimal. It doesn’t take into account the different densities of fat, muscle, bone or tissue in your body. There is no physiologic reason to square a person’s height and weight and then apply any level of medical decision making to that arbitrary number.

#3: Continued reliance on BMI creates more scientific authority and barriers to care than it should

So many things in our healthcare system rely on this bogus equation. Insurance companies can charge more for a person with higher BMI. Doctors can deny life saving procedures based on it. The military can turn away a perfectly fit, healthy person. Some medications are not formulated for larger bodies, but are instead based on BMI which would affect people different based on their composition instead of this stupid number. Its mathematical snake oil and we need to tear it up and do actual, real science with experts to measure levels of health.

If you’ve made it this far into my rant about BMI, I want to leave you with one final thought. We can go over and over the issues with this formula but here’s the biggest one:

You are not a math problem.

Your body is a complex, ever changing system that cannot and should not be reduced down to a simple multiplication of your outer dimensions. Your bones, fat, muscle, organs and tissues all have different compositions and mass. Your activity levels and metabolism change as you move through life.

You are and always will be enough, and no simple math will ever change that.