Were measuring obesity wrong experts pinpoint3 signsyou may fit the bill regardless of your BMI

Get a load of this — you may be obese after all!About 40% of US adults — more than 100 million Americans — are considered obese.It’s a growing public health crisis that makes patients vulnerable to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and certain cancers.Now, a global commission of 56 medical experts is proposing a major overhaul of how obesity is defined and diagnosed, which means the days of relying solely on body mass index to reveal if you’re overweight or obese may be numbered.The new guidance considers how excess fat is distributed around the body and how it affects organ function and daily life, paving the way for two new obesity categories.“Our reframing acknowledges the nuanced reality of obesity and allows for personalized care,” said commission chair Dr.

Francesco Rubino of King’s College London.Here’s a look at the commission’s recommendations, published Tuesday in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters.A BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese, while a BMI of 40 or above is considered severely obese.A Belgian mathematician devised the formula in the 1830s, but it took about 150 years, until the 1980s, for the calculation to become the international standard for measuring obesity.As of late, critics have called BMI an unreliable measure of health.“BMI-based measures of obesity can both underestimate and overestimate [the amount of fat stored in the body] and provide inadequate information about health at the individual level, which undermines medically sound approaches to health care and policy,” the commission wrote.The commission suggests confirming obesity with one of these methods:“Relying on BMI alone to diagnose obesity is problematic,” said commissioner Dr.

Robert Eckel, “as some people tend to store excess fat at the waist or in and around their organs, such as the liver, the heart or the muscles, and this is associated with...