Target weight

Body Mass Index is a generally accepted way to look at how your height and weight should relate to each other. BMI is the ratio of your weight to the square of your height

An ideal BMI for an adult male is someplace in the range of about 20.7-28.4.

Using the upper end of that range you can estimate a target weight (including a factor for conversion between feet/pounds and metric measurements) as

W = .0404 * H²

where H is your height in inches.

For me, at 68 inches, that gives a target weight of about 186 pounds.

Ideally I think I should probably weigh in less than that, but it provides a good target at the upper range of acceptable weight for me.

Body Mass Index

Body Mass Index (BMI) seems to be the international standard for standardizing ideas about weight goals and ideal weight. It a measurement that reflects how well your weight matches to the ideal for your height.

Your Body Mass Index is the ratio of your weight and height. Actually the ratio of your weight to the square of your height. The standard measurements are in metric but you can use pounds and inches for your measurements and multiply the result of your weight divided by the square of your height by 703 for the conversion.

I need to incorporate BMI into my nutritional constraints and objectives for the diet linear programming model I'm working on. I haven't done that yet, but I will.

Gaining weight

I got weighed at the doctors office the other day. I'm gaining weight, up to 217 pounds. That's bad, really bad.

I've been careful with my carb intake and things like sodium, but I haven't been paying attention to calories. That has to change. I really need to get down to something more like 170. I have to get serious about losing weight.

My hypertension problems are such that I have shortness of breath and lack of stamina so I can't really do more than what they call moderate exercise (30 minutes of physical activity a day). I can do that, but not all at one time, and that about does it for the day for me. At least until I lose some weight and maybe get some stamina back.

I found some guidelines on calories and weight loss.

It says to establish a baseline calorie need for weight maintenance by multiplying your weight by 15. That gives me 3,255. Let's just call it 3,200. Then they recommend a target loss of 1-2 pounds a week by reducing the maintenance level by 500-1,000 calories.

So they suggest I should target between 2,200 and 2,700 calories per day. Of course once a lose a couple of pounds I can progressively lower that calorie target.

Okay, I'll start counting calories.