Waist to height ratio.
The simplest check for fat around the middle.
Your waist to height ratio is your waist measurement divided by your height, in the same units. NICE advises keeping your waist to less than half your height: a ratio under 0.5. Work out yours below. It takes a tape measure and a minute.
Your ratio.
Enter your waist and your height in the same units. The bands are the ones NICE uses.
| Waist to height ratio | NICE band |
|---|---|
| Under 0.4 | Outside the bands NICE gives. Check both measurements. |
| 0.4 to 0.49 | Healthy |
| 0.5 to 0.59 | Increased health risk |
| 0.6 and over | Further increased health risk |
Source: NICE NG246. The bands describe groups of people, not a diagnosis for any one person.
Five steps, one tape.
- 1. Stand up straight with your feet together, and breathe out normally.
- 2. At your side, find the bottom of your lowest rib and the top of your hip bone.
- 3. Wrap the tape around your waist halfway between the two, level all the way round. For most people this is a little above the belly button.
- 4. Keep the tape snug without pressing into the skin, and read it at the end of a normal breath out.
- 5. Measure your height without shoes, standing against a wall, in the same units.
Where fat sits.
Two people can weigh the same and carry very different waists. The scale cannot tell you where your weight sits. A tape can.
Visceral fat is the fat stored deep inside the abdomen, around the organs. You cannot see it in the mirror, and a tape cannot measure it directly. What a tape does show is how much you carry around the middle, and NICE advises keeping your waist to less than half your height.
If yours is 0.5 or over, I would start with daily movement and how you eat, not by cutting food. That is where the work begins with every client.
Waist to height tells you where your body stores fat. It does not tell you how well it moves. The Five Minute Baseline adds a one leg stand, a floor sit and rise, push-ups and an overhead squat, each against the published average for your age group.
Twenty minutes, with me.
We talk about your week, your health and what you have tried before. If the programme fits you, I will say so. If it does not, I will say that too.