Your Ideal Weight

How much should you weigh to be considered optimally healthy? A recent item in the March ’10 BottomLine Health outlined an interesting formula: For women start with 100 pounds for your first five feet of height and add five pounds for each additional inch. So if you’re 5’3”, your ideal weight is 100 plus 15 (three inches times five pounds), or 115 pounds.

Men should start with 106 pounds for the first five feet, then add five pounds for each additional inch. So if you’re 5’9”, you should weigh 151 (106 plus 45). Hmm, so a lot of pro bodybuilders are more than 100 pounds overweight. How about a more realistic scale for guys with muscle?

Steve Reeves’ book Building the Classic Physique the Natural Way provides a proportion chart. The base model stands 6’ tall and weighs 200 pounds. For every inch over that, the ideal weight goes up 10 pounds. Below 5’11 and 190 pounds, weight should decline by five pounds for every inch. So the previous example of a 5’9” male weighing an ideal 151 would come in at a muscular 180 pounds with Reeves’ chart. Remember, Reeves was the star of the Hercules movies from the late 1950s, and he was all about proportion and symmetry. He would scoff at the freaky bodybuilders onstage today as being totally out of whack—and far from ideal.

—Becky Holman
X-tremeLean.com