Pop your gender, height, weight and age into the BMI calculator below and we’ll tell you what your BMI is and what constitutes a ‘healthy’ BMI for your age and height. If you can’t see the widget below, check out the NHS’ BMI calculator here.
It is tricky to accurately measure bodies, as everyone is different and no two people are built the same.
You might have heard that BMI is inaccurate, outdated or unreliable as a measuring tool. This is because it cannot distinguish between muscle weight and fat weight. For example, some athletes who have a high amount of muscle mass but a low body fat percentage end up with a high BMI, placing them in the ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ category according to BMI calculations, when they’re anything but.
You can read more about the limitations of BMI here.
For the general population, BMI remains one of the easiest tools for assessing a person’s body mass. It’s not perfect by any means, and won’t be accurate for many groups of people (athletes, people with eating disorders, elderly people who may have lost muscle but retained excess fat).
But what it does have going for it is that it’s easy to use, freely available and doesn’t require costly equipment. So unless you know you have an extremely low body fat percentage, chances are that if you have a high BMI, you probably are overweight.