The Body Mass Index (BMI) is a number that must tell us a great deal about our health, right? After all, it’s printed at the top of the page, right next to your name and DOB on most medical records, so it must be important!

But what does it really tell us? At its core, BMI only reflects two things: a person’s weight relative to their height. Yet, for reasons that are more historical than scientific, this simplistic metric is widely used by healthcare systems to define health.

What does it mean to be healthy? Is it the absence of disease? Can it be summarized with a number?

Unfortunately, we’re still pretty behind when it comes to fully understanding what it means to be healthy, and that is partly because our healthcare systems still rely on outdated measures to determine health status.

Ob*sity is described as a complex medical condition, brought on by many factors, that leads to excessive body fat. In recent years, we’ve even heard more and more about obesity being a disease, one that is complicated and still quite misunderstood. For such a complicated medical condition, we sure have a pretty naive way of defining and diagnosing it.