Categories
A frequent use of the BMI is to assess how much an individual's body weight departs from what is normal or desirable for a person of his or her height. The weight excess or deficiency may, in part, be accounted for by body fat (adipose tissue) although other factors such as muscularity also affect BMI significantly (see discussion below and overweight). The WHO regards a BMI of less than 18.5 as underweight and may indicate malnutrition, an eating disorder, or other health problems, while a BMI greater than 25 is considered overweight and above 30 is considered obese. These ranges of BMI values are valid only as statistical categories
| Category | BMI range – kg/m2 | BMI Prime |
|---|---|---|
| Very severely underweight | less than 15.0 | less than 0.60 |
| Severely underweight | from 15.0 to 16.0 | from 0.60 to 0.64 |
| Underweight | from 16.0 to 18.5 | from 0.64 to 0.74 |
| Normal (healthy weight) | from 18.5 to 25 | from 0.74 to 1.0 |
| Overweight | from 25 to 30 | from 1.0 to 1.2 |
| Obese Class I (Moderately obese) | from 30 to 35 | from 1.2 to 1.4 |
| Obese Class II (Severely obese) | from 35 to 40 | from 1.4 to 1.6 |
| Obese Class III (Very severely obese) | over 40 | over 1.6 |
Read more about this topic: Body Mass Index
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)