A tape measure is a better tool against obesity

Throw away your scales and burn the BMI charts. There is another way to pre­dict health risks and it has noth­ing to do with weight.

A recent study from the Mayo Clinic found that weigh­ing and cal­cu­lat­ing risks with a BMI chart is a poor pre­dic­tor of heart dis­ease. Get out the tape mea­sure and wrap it around your middle.

Start­ing at the belly but­ton, find the hip bone. Let the tape mea­sure ride just above the hip and that is your waist. Wrap the tape around the rest of the body and read the number.

The fat stored in the belly area lies deep in the abdom­i­nal cav­ity and has been linked to increased lev­els of the stress hor­mone, cor­ti­sol. The more fat, the more cor­ti­sol. The more cor­ti­sol, the more heart dis­ease, higher blood pres­sure and greater inci­dence of a stroke, dia­betes, cer­tain can­cers, demen­tia and even uri­nary incontinence.

The idea of mea­sur­ing the waist cir­cum­fer­ence has been around for years but new reports now sug­gest that it is not how much you weigh but where you carry your weight that mat­ters most to your health. The data was the same for men and women.

Stud­ies sug­gest that health risks begin to increase when a woman’s waist reaches 31.5 inches and her risk jumps sub­stan­tially once her waist expands to 35 inches or more. For men, risk starts to climb at 37 inches, but it becomes a big­ger worry once their waists reach or exceed 40 inches.

How­ever, those num­bers are based on aver­ages and are not always use­ful for very tall or short peo­ple, chil­dren or cer­tain eth­nic groups. Com­par­ing the waist mea­sure­ment with the hip mea­sure­ment seems to be bet­ter indi­ca­tor of over­all health risks.

Par­tic­u­larly for young peo­ple, the waist-to-height ratio might be a bet­ter way to pre­dict the risks of dis­ease. Put sim­ply, your waist should be less than half your height.

Hav­ing a large waist for your height means you are more likely to have fat around your heart, liver and even ordi­nary mus­cles. Your organs require some fat as pro­tec­tion but too much fat can be dan­ger­ous. A high waist to hip ratio sig­nals that you should be screened for other health prob­lems, like insulin resis­tance and high cho­les­terol — par­tic­u­larly high triglycerides.

Los­ing even a small per­cent­age of weight can have a big effect. In one study, 20 very large peo­ple were put on a very low-calorie diet. They lost an aver­age of 20 per­cent of their body weight. That trans­lated into a decrease in waist size. Inside the body, the effect was amaz­ing. Using imag­ing tech­nol­ogy, researchers found that the layer of fat around the heart shrank, caus­ing less stress on the heart.

If you have a large waist, the first goal should be to stop gain­ing weight. Exer­cise will tone the mus­cles around the fat. Improv­ing the food choices will lower your risk for heart and other prob­lems, even if you never lose pounds or inches.

Focus­ing on being as healthy as you can and not obsess­ing about your weight is the key. Obe­sity man­age­ment should not be about num­bers on a scale. It is about improv­ing people’s health.

Bob­bie Ran­dall is a cer­ti­fied dia­betes edu­ca­tor, reg­is­tered, licensed dietit­ian. She super­vises a dia­betes self-management train­ing pro­gram at Aultman-Orrville Hos­pi­tal, Orrville. Con­tact her at bobbie.randall@aultmanorrville.org or 330–684-4776.

Posted by Bobbie Randall on Feb 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.