14 DAY TRIAL // For years now, doctors have been labeling people as normal, underweight or overweight depending on their Body Mass Index (BMI, for short).
The problem is that a person's BMI isn't exactly easy to calculate and so confusion may arise when regular folks try to figure out whether or not they could stand to lose some weight.
Thus, to determine BMI, a person's weight in kilograms must be divided by how tall they are in meters squared. Then, it's off to a table to interpret the results.
The good news is that, according to a recent study, there is one other and much simpler way to determine whether or not a person is overweight.
Simply use a string to measure their height and then fold it in half and see if it goes all around their waist. If it does, all good. If not, you'd better put down those cookies.
Specialists say that, because it focuses on the individual's waistline, this method is actually preferred to the BMI one as it reveals excess abdominal weight.
Besides, there's no question that everyone who owns a piece of string can do this test in the privacy of their own home and find out whether they should diet in a jippy.
“Checking that waist-to-height ratio is less than 0.5 could not be simpler: all that is needed is a piece of string, not even a tape measure,” said researcher Margaret Ashwell, as cited by DM.