In Detail

The medical literature refers to the ideal weight fairly often. Howeve, if you ask how to determine it, you are almost always referred to the Body Mass Index (BMI). The shortcomings of this method for individual body analysis have been known for a long time. Particularly with pronounced fat and/or muscle structure it can come to larger discrepancies. How is this possible? Many relevant factors remain unconsidered in the BMI, such as a different bone structure, a differently developed musculature or a high body fat level.

There have been many attempts to break this limitation of the BMI, but none of the proposed procedures has been able to prevail in practice. The procedure presented here is innovative and evidence based, i.e. it is based on scientific studies. The idea behind the system is to define a standard collective and then derive the relevant parameters from it. This is, so to speak, the blue print of body analysis.

It is based on measurements taken by W. Schlegel and his assistant G. Hopfeld on young adults aged 18 to 30 for men and 17 to 30 for women, all living in Hamburg and the surrounding area. The measurements were carried out between 1955 and 1973, at a time when neither junk nor fast food with the corresponding restaurant chains existed. In general, the diet at that time was significantly lower in calories, and the number of obese people was only a fraction of the number seen today. The evaluated collective thus fuses two aspects:

A low caloric lifestyle with the general fitness of young adults.

Such a collective is hardly reproducible today and can therefore be called a telling reference collective  - with a certain justification. This reference collective was the basis of the study at that time and led to the fact that for the first time a certain bone structure (light/medium/heavy) could be assigned to a single individual (1).

However, the system could not achieve a further differentiation between fat and muscle. This was only made possible by the extensive studies of M. Ashwell (2) and colleagues, who intensively investigated the connection between abdominal girth and cardiological risks. The basis for this was the waist to height ratio (WHtR).

Where possible, this data was transferred to the reference collective and incorporated into the algorithms. This provided the prerequisites for differentiating between fat and muscle in addition to bone structure.

The author is a physician and has a PhD on the subject of "Child development and obesity". He habilitated in the field of molecular biology.