Is this girl overweight?

[LilyLovesSid]

Here

From the photo I would say she looks fine, but apparently not according to her BMI.

Is there a better way than BMI to assess someone's healthy weight? Especially for children - is there any way to assess them as they still grow?

portofino - 'at risk of becoming overweight' !!! what a load of bollocks! everyone is at risk of becoming overweight - the 'normal' range is a range because we are all different.

being towards the top of 'normal' is no more 'at risk of being overweight' than being elsewhere in the normal range.

people make this mistake with adults too - bmi of about 19 to 24 is 'normal' and the range allows for different builds but still some people think that to be BMI 19 is 'better' than to be 23.

They did this at my dd's school and 2 of her friends came up as obese, they are what I would call solid and with a jelly belly LOL - definetley (can never spell that!)a little bit overweight but by no means obese! They were right off the scale off the far side of the red. I would therefore say the scale they used to graph this is way out.

My dd was 4ft 11.6 and 6stone 7lb and just off centre on the chart.

The BMI is a load of crap...thats my official opinion..I've always been over weight apparently since I was young enough to weigh myself on those dodgy machines in Boots...facts are I'm muscular ...I have never looked how much I actually weigh...I think it makes people worry about being overweight when they are not..

I think the fast test gives more interesting results. A few years back I was 7.5 stone and toned but shockingly over 30% was fat - I was told to shape up!!! They pointed over to a woman who looked very chunky to me but explained her body fat ratio was much much lower than mine so she was in fact far healthier than me.

Made me think of weight in a very different light.

My almost 4 year old eats like a bird and looks chunky - partly because he's very active and hence quite muscular and also because he's got my round face - it doesn't worry me in the SLIGHTEST. Noone could convince me that my ds could end up with health issues given what he looks like now.

I think the Mum has blown this out of all proportion and all this publicity may contribute to a future eating disorder.

She should have just binned the letter and moved on - her child is obviously not fat.

She was on the tv this morning saying she is an experienced mum and has no worries her child will develop an eating disorder.

I think she was well out of order to discuss this in front of her child and if there is a future problem she will have to take some responsibility for it imo.

She doesn't look fat at all. But after commenting on the other thread about not having any overweight DC at our school, I was shocked at the amount of girls I saw swimming yesterday who had rolls of fat and stretchmarks

And the amount of teenage girls wearing t-shirts over their costumes

Seems a very bizarre reaction. So she is not bothered, well fine, no problem, move on. My dh scored as obese on the BMI charts when he was weight training (might even have been morbidly so). He did a bit of research and found that there were better tests for the very athletic (actually he wasn't very athletic, but he was atypical). Of course he knew very well that at the time he was both very muscular and fat. So long as your perceptions are not skewed it isn't that hard to see that wobbly bits, double chins etc aren't ideal. Or being terribly gaunt for that matter.

Lots of screening tools are crude, they aren't supposed to be precise, just cheap and easy to use and picking up enough of what needs to be picked up whilst keeping the false positives and negatives small.

At ds2s primary school health check he too was classed as off the scale - i was so furious as even the nurse agreed he was slim that I took him to the doctor,who told me in no uncertain terms that these 'guidelines' are bollo*ks.

The BMI is not much use as a measurement IMO (and many others, & I work indirectly for an organisation that uses it widely!) - it uses only height and weight and doesn't take into account any individual factors such as body composition. It's so generalised as to be almost worthless when used on a mass scale like this which is exactly why I opted out of having DS measured..

I know what you mean mii - took DD swimming yesterday with 3 friends - 2 were really really really thin, you know the little twig undeveloped ones, one is a bit of a chubby one, mainly round the tummy BUT there were 2 other groups of 3 or 4 girls and they had 2 or 3 out of their 3 or 4 were deffinetely (OH MY GOD! THATS TWICE TODAY I'VE USED THIS WORD ON HERE AND I JUST CAN'T SPELL IT!)
pretty overweight.

Well according to BMI checker dd1 is over weight even though dd is like a twig, low muscle tone and i can see her ribs .

Is the top picture in your profile pics your DD1?

yummy- yes, just added a few more recent ones as the one at the top was over 1 year old. Dd2 is 2 years younger than dd1 and almost the same weight and height.

Mum should have just binned letter, I reckon she just wants her five minutes of fame. The daughter never had to know about it.

I think it is a good idea to draw parents attention to their childrens weight, at the end of the day we look at our children through rose tinted glasses, (my FIL was just round and told me he thought DS1 was skinny, now Im really worried! Will be taking him to HV for a weigh in and chat I think)

I've heard that if a child is obese at 5 they are most likely to stay that way for the rest of their lives.

Marne your DD1 is not overweght in the least !