What is Body Mass Index?
How much weight does my child need to lose to be at a healthy weight?
I start this podcast by answering these basic questions.
A helpful calculator for teens is listed here:
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/bmi/calculator.html
I hope its helpful.
If you like this episode, share it with your friends.
Best,
Dr G
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
To get a free copy of 30 healthy and easy recipes for teens that are high in protein, visit
https://lifestyleforteens.com/recipes
To learn more about the LIFT Program, visit lifestyleforteens.com/program
What is Body Mass Index?
How much weight does my child need to lose to be at a healthy weight?
I start this podcast by answering these basic questions.
A helpful calculator for teens is listed here:
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/bmi/calculator.html
I hope its helpful.
If you like this episode, share it with your friends.
Best,
Dr G
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
To get a free copy of 30 healthy and easy recipes for teens that are high in protein, visit
https://lifestyleforteens.com/recipes
To learn more about the LIFT Program, visit lifestyleforteens.com/program
Are you getting frustrated with what to feed a teenager who is always hungry? Everybody knows that teenagers have a huge appetite. It seems like you need to feed them constantly to satisfy their hunger. It's even more difficult where teenagers who struggle with their weight truly want to make changes like cut down on junk food or stop ever eating, and they can't. There's frustration, isolation, stress, and that's why I decided to create a recipe collection of 30 easy and healthy meals for teenagers. They're all high in protein to satisfy your teenager's hunger and they can all be ready in less than 30 minutes. If you want to grab a free copy, go to lifestyleforteenscom for our last recipes.
Speaker 2:This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 1:Hello, welcome to the Weight Loss and Lifestyle for Teens podcast. My name is Dr Jenny Gorgary, an apitiatic endocrinologist, certified obesity medicine specialist and pediatric weight loss coach. My goal is to educate families that have teenagers who struggle to lose weight how to build healthy habits that last, so their teens can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again. I know how hard it is when teens try to get in shape. I used to struggle with my weight, too, as a teenager. What most teenagers do when they are unhappy with how they look is they try every diet that comes their way on TikTok or Facebook. They may try random detox programs or magic shakes, or starve themselves for days, only to end up overeating after a few days and gain back all the weight, feeling more frustrated, sad and desperate. The source of the information that is on social media sometimes is reliable and sometimes is not. The truth is, there is a lot of reliable and excellent research that has been done in the field of pediatric weight loss by scientists all around the world. However, families can have hard time understanding the scientific language or they don't always know how to find the answer they're looking for. I'm here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in children. I will therefore choose interesting articles that have been published by scientists in this field and give you the take home message so you can educate yourself on topics around weight loss in teens. So let me just start by answering one basic question. I get asked a lot from parents and that question is how much weight does my teen need to lose to being a healthy weight? I've been thinking about what is the easiest way for me to give you this answer In order to break it down for you.
Speaker 1:First. I need to start by saying we need first to understand what is body mass index, or BMI. You're going to hear me talking about this in the future episodes because it is a tool that scientists use over and over again where they're conducting research around pediatric weight loss, to figure out if a method that they're doing is effective or not. The reason we use body mass index is because we can't use a certain amount of weight to say this child is overweight by this amount or that amount, and that is because children have different heights and weights at different ages. So body mass index for kids takes into account the height and weight of a certain person, and then we have certain graphs that we use. That kind of gives us the information of whether a child is within normal weight, underweight, overweight or in the obese category BMI range. So in order to calculate the body mass index, what we need to do is we need to divide a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of formulas that you can find on Google to calculate the body mass index. However, the easiest source if you want to know the body mass index of a child is to go to a reliable source, that is, the CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention BMI Percentile Calculator for Child and Teen. I'm going to put this link on my show notes so you can go to lifestyle14.com and I will put this link cdccom For what's last healthy weight, for what's last BMI. So once you get to this page, you can enter a child's age, a sex, whether it's a boy or girl, their height and inches or in meters. So if you're using meters, just make sure you use the metric system and if you're using pounds, you can just use the English system. So we can make an example. So let's say we have a 14 years old girl that is 160 pounds and this child is 63 inches or 53. Then you click on calculate and what you get is that this child's body mass index is 28.3, placing BMI for age at the 96th percentile.
Speaker 1:For a 14 years old, this falls in the obesity BMI category. It actually gives you a breakout below of the different categories of a body mass index. So any child that the body mass index is less than the fifth percentile that is classified as being underweight. Between fifth and 85th percentile is the normal weight. Overweight is 85 to 95th percentile and obesity range is equal or greater than the 95th percentile. So the first piece of information you get right away from this table is that you know that this particular child is within the obesity BMI category. So you know that this child needs to lose some weight in order to be in the healthy weight category.
Speaker 1:The easiest way that I could think of for you to figure out the weight I mean there can be a more sophisticated model that requires you to do calculations, but I figure, since we can use internet and it's already automated in this website why don't you go back to the previous page and don't change any of the information, just change the weight. So instead of 160 pounds let's try to put 145 pounds and click again calculate. When you click calculate, you see that if this child was 145 pounds, then they would have a body mass index at the 92nd percentile, which would still be overweight BMI category. So let's go back again and change this number to 132 pounds and click again calculate. Once you get that, then you see that 132 pounds is at the 85th percentile. So you can just play with the numbers and it may take you sometimes, but to figure out what number gives you the 85th percentile, as I said, there is another way to do it, but it may require more calculations for you. So this will just require that you just play around with different numbers until you get to the 85th percentile.
Speaker 1:And there you have it this particular child. That is 160 pounds. If the same child today weighted 132 pounds, then they would be at the highest normal weight for their age. So this child is approximately 28 pounds overweight. Now, something to take into consideration is the fact that teenagers continue to grow. So if a certain child at a certain age continues to grow, what is overweight today may not be overweight a year or two years from now. So when you look at these numbers, take into account. Take into consideration the fact that this child will grow and it may not be overweight a year from now. That depends how much more extra weight this child has today, how many more years does this child has left to grow, and it is hard to predict all these numbers for every child. However, when you calculate what is the amount of extra weight today, that gives you a sense of more or less how much overweight a certain child is, and I would encourage you to talk to your pediatrician directly to give you the specific number that reflects to the amount and the healthy weight of your child.
Speaker 1:Now I wanted also to mention something else that I hear a lot and I see a lot on the Internet. A lot of people don't like using body mass index because they say it can often overestimate body fat that somebody has, especially in people that do a lot of exercise and I agree that is true in people that are athletes or the bodybuilders, they can have a high BMI with less amount of body fat. However, in the majority of cases, when we're talking about teenagers and children that are overweight or obese, the percentage of body fat tends to be proportionate to the percentage of the body mass index. There are other methods that are more precise that are used to calculate the body fat percentage, and I can explain more about this in future episodes. However, I want to say that body mass index because it is so easy to calculate and all it requires is weight, height and the sex of the person. It is the most commonly used tool that scientists used when they are publishing manuscripts and when they're publishing research that examines what works and what doesn't work, whether a method is effective or not effective. If a method is able to improve the body mass index, that is usually regarded as an effective method for weight loss. This is the reason why I bring up BMI and how to calculate it, because you're going to hear me talk about this again and again, so I want you to know what body mass index is.
Speaker 1:Once again, looking at the body mass index doesn't mean that we only focus on weight. Doesn't mean the body mass index is the best tool out there that can give you the best and more comprehensive information about body health. No, it is not. It is, however, a very good tool and the most commonly used tool to track the progress of someone over time. I hope this was helpful and not very complicated. As I said, I'm going to link to this CDC website on my show notes. You can go to lifestyle14.com for a slash one and find this calculator there, so it's easier for you to figure out the amount of weight that your teenager needs to lose to be at a healthy weight today. I hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast and I will talk to you again next week. Take care, bye.
Speaker 2:If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, I invite you to come check out the Lift program. It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyle14.com and click on the work with me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens.