Calculate your Body Mass Index and see which healthy-range category you fall into.
BMI = weight(kg) / height(m)²
Categories: below 18.5 underweight, 18.5–24.9 normal, 25–29.9 overweight, 30+ obese. BMI is a screening tool, not a diagnosis — it doesn't account for muscle mass, age, or sex.
BMI only uses height and weight, so it can't tell where your weight comes from — a heavily muscled athlete and a sedentary person of the same height and weight get the identical BMI, even though their health profiles are very different. It also can't see where fat is stored, and visceral fat (around the organs) carries more metabolic risk than fat stored elsewhere, at the same BMI. That's why doctors treat BMI as a screening tool to flag who might need a closer look, not a standalone diagnosis.
One correction matters specifically for Indian users: the standard WHO BMI bands (normal 18.5–24.9, overweight 25–29.9, obese 30+) were built primarily on data from European and North American populations. A large UK study following more than 1.4 million people found that the type-2-diabetes risk a Caucasian adult reaches at BMI 30 shows up in South Asian adults at around BMI 23.9 — meaning a South Asian person with a "normal" BMI of 24 can carry a similar metabolic risk to a European person with a BMI of 30. WHO's own 2004 guidance for Asian populations lowers the practical cutoffs to roughly 18.5–22.9 as normal, 23–27.4 as overweight, and 27.5+ as obese. If you're of South Asian descent, treat the standard Western bands as too lenient rather than as the definitive answer.
BMI is calculated purely from height and weight, with no measurement of what that weight is made of. A muscular person and a person carrying the same weight in fat will show the identical BMI, even though their body composition and health risk are very different — this is BMI's best-known limitation.
Not without adjustment. Research shows South Asians develop metabolic risks like type 2 diabetes at meaningfully lower BMI values than the Western-derived standard suggests, so WHO's Asian-specific guidance lowers the "normal" ceiling to around 23 rather than 25, and "obese" starts around 27.5 rather than 30.
Not necessarily. BMI can't detect where fat is stored — visceral fat around the abdominal organs carries higher metabolic risk than fat stored elsewhere, even at an identical BMI. Someone with a "normal" BMI but high visceral fat (sometimes called "skinny fat") can carry real metabolic risk that BMI alone won't show.
Waist-to-hip ratio or plain waist circumference add information about fat distribution that BMI misses, since abdominal fat carries more metabolic risk than fat stored on the hips or thighs at the same total weight. Neither replaces a clinical assessment, but together they give a more complete screening picture than BMI alone.