What does 5 11 200 lbs look like

When I first meet a training, or coaching client, I normally ask, “How much would you like to change your weight?”

Most of them pause, shrug their shoulders, and then reply, “I’m not sure, maybe…” then take a guess at how much weight they want to lose.

The amount of weight you want to lose (or gain) doesn’t have to be a guessing game. There’s a formula to calculate your goal weight more precisely so you can have that magic number in your head that motivates you to eat well and train hard.

Old Ideal Body Weight Formula: BMI

The most common method of measuring your ideal weight is using the Body Mass Index (BMI), which measures the relationship between your weight and your height.

Do you notice anything wrong with the traditional BMI calculation, which is used in almost every weight loss study? It doesn’t take into account your body fat percentage!

In fact, Ancel Keys is given credit for popularizing BMI in a 1972 paper, but he explicitly stated BMI was appropriate for population studies, NOT individual diagnoses.

Using BMI, just about every NFL football player is considered obese, even though most have very low body fat percentages. Conversely, the number of “overfat” Americans is believed to be higher than what BMI predicts. You don’t have to be overweight by the BMI Index to be considered “overfat” on a body fat basis.

BuiltLean Ideal Body Weight Formula

It turns out there’s a MUCH better way to calculate your ideal weight that takes into account your body fat percentage.

Here it is:

Lean Body Mass/(1 – Desired Body Fat Percentage)

Lean Body Mass (LBM) is bodyweight – (bodyweight x current body fat percentage).

Just to be clear, your LBM is your “fat free” mass, in other words, everything in your body that’s not fat: your bones, blood, muscle, and organs.

Let me give you an example of this ideal body weight formula in action so you can see why it’s so useful. Let’s take Jake who is 200 pounds and has 22% body fat. Using this information, we know that his LBM is 156 pounds and the amount of body fat he has is 44 pounds.

So what should Jake’s ideal weight be? Well that’s really up to him. For most men, a mid double digit body fat percentage of say 15% is considered pretty good.

Here’s a chart for your reference:

So now, here’s the important part. We are going to assume Jake doesn’t lose any muscle because he has been following all the tips I’ve discussed so far on BuiltLean. So keeping his LBM at 156 pounds, Jake needs to drop 16 pounds of fat to reach his desired body fat percentage of 15%. His ideal weight is 184 pounds in this scenario.

Here’s how Jake’s ideal body weight calculation looks:

156/(1 – 0.15) = 184 pounds

See how valuable this is now? Your body weight doesn’t have to be a guessing game anymore.

I’ll be following up with some articles on the various ways to calculate your body fat percentage. For now, I advise going to your local gym and having one of the trainers do a skin fold body fat measurement, or you can grab an Accu-Measure Personal Body Fat Caliper (affiliate link) for $6 at Amazon.com and do it yourself (it’s surprisingly accurate for most people).

I hope this has cleared up some confusion for you and highlighted the importance of thinking about your weight in terms of your body fat percentage.

This may be an unpopular post, but I have to get it out there. Besides, isn't the point to incite discussion? I had a couple interesting responses to a post yesterday that reminded me of the general perception that's it's become 'ok' to be large.

Take a look at the desirable weights charts for people with the lowest mortality weights by frame, ages 25-59.

Mine is ~160 lbs, being 5'11" and medium build (measuring both wrist and elbow). I weigh 210lbs at 15-16% BF (the so called healthy range). That's 50lbs greater than the desirable weight and even still 20 lbs more than the max for a guy 6'4". Fifty. Pounds. Holy Fuck just reading it makes me cringe.

Now I know fit people have more muscle than the average person, blah blah, but that's not the point, fit people make up a small minority of the population. The point is people not seeing that as being a problem. Outside of my immediate circle, if I tell people I'm too fat, they cringe, they scoff. I grab a nice chunk of belly fat and they say 'it's normal and ok' No, it's not ok and being normal doesn't make it right.

This is turning into a rant and that's not what I want. For the crowd that says, "It's 'healthy' to be ample and those charts are skinny, unobtainable standards." Well, maybe a little. I haven't been 160 lbs since I was 17, but until the general populace realizes that 'normal' and 'ok' do not mean the same thing, we are in for much worse health and obesity problems. Also, remember that this chart is made by an insurance company for people with the lowest mortality rate so they can maximize their profits. They are not just throwing out numbers willy nilly.

When did 200 lbs become not big? Probably about the same time Desert became ok to eat for Breakfast...

Edit: Fixed my retarded linking skills by linking charts.

Edit#2: Let me clarify a bit, I'm discussing mostly about people who do not exercise and feel that larger is ok because it's normal.

Edit #3: Here is a link for a better estimation of weights, but still shows my height as 180ish and kind of validates my point even adjusted for today.

http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/body.htm

Is it healthy to be 200 pounds?

Is 200 pounds overweight for a man?