A 2021 meta-analysis confirms weight loss improves health-related quality of life in overweight individuals, with greater effects in more obese individuals. Being in energy deficit also promotes autophagy, a cellular clean-up mechanism that recycles and removes excess and dysfunctional components of the body. Experiments show losing body fat has very strong and consistent positive effects on almost every health biomarker, including blood sugar, heart rate, cholesterol levels and systemic inflammation markers. In fact, being overweight is currently the second leading cause of death in the modern world and is expected to take over tobacco use soon. Being lean protects against diabetes, reduces chronic inflammation levels and corrects hormonal imbalances, whereas obesity is causally related to virtually all leading causes of death. Excess fatty acids can also accumulate in our blood vessels and other organs, impairing their functionality. Visceral fat mass secretes inflammatory proteins, hormones and other substances that decrease our insulin sensitivity, promote inflammation and disrupt our hormonal balance. Fat tissue, especially the visceral fat around your organs, negatively influences many systems in the body. In people that don’t lift weights, a high BMI is a reasonable indicator of excess body fat. The dangers of a high body fat percentage Adapted from the Global BMI Mortality Collaboration (2016).īefore we get to why a low BMI is associated with poor health, it’s important to understand why a high BMI is bad for you. The relative risk of dying (all-cause mortality) in men and women based on their BMI. See the figure below for the data from a meta-analysis on the topic. There is a progressively higher risk when they’re underweight or overweight and a much higher risk when they’re obese. People generally have the lowest chance of dying in the coming years when their BMI is between 20 and 25. Literally hundreds of studies have been done on the relationship between BMI and health and they show a reasonably consistent J-shaped relationship between BMI and all-cause mortality, the risk of dying from any cause. BMI doesn’t directly measure body fat stores, so there are obvious problems with converting a BMI value to an exact body fat percentage.ĭespite its problems, BMI remains very popular in research, because it’s cheap and quick to calculate, in contrast to laboratory grade body fat percentage measurements. BMI is just weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared (see formula below). There’s a ton of research on the relationship between body fat level and health, but the vast majority of the research uses Body Mass Index (BMI) as a proxy for body fat level. Can you be healthy at every size? Losing fat can obviously be healthy for some people, but why is fat loss healthy exactly? And can you lose too much fat or is leaner always better? Let’s look at what the scientific research says about what the most healthy body fat percentage is.
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