How do you calculate a "target weight"

Do you wonder whether your child's weight goals are appropriate? There is a very simple and too rarely used tool.

Have your doctor chart your child's growth curve from childhood. It isn't hard to do:
For girls up to 20
For boys up to 20

You can do it yourself by plugging in the weights.

If a child has always been in the 50th percentile for weight, that helps figure out where they would be now, if not for the illness. If they are destined by their DNA to be in the 75th percentile it follows that your goal will be to get back there.

The actual weight goals will change over time into the 20s. The BMI will not remain stable.

Of course your child wants to be healthy at a 10th percentile for weight, a level some physicians settle for. But if they haven't been there all their lives, and your family's DNA isn't there either, why would we think that is healthy?

Comments

  1. Laura,

    These charts are good, definitely better than just estimating and hoping for the best, or letting Ed run the show.

    I kind of did mine, from the vague numbers of what I remembered, and these charts go completely off when I started puberty. I gained weight, and then shot up 4 inches in a year. I was at my adult height and weight at 13. I traveled out to the 20 year mark and my percentiles were so much different.

    This BMI thing is so frigging imprecise that I'm doubly appalled schools are using it and judging kids based upon something that simply isn't accurate!

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