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Fitness, Not Weight, Is the Best Marker of Health, Finds New Study

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Fitness, Not Weight, Is the Best Marker of Health, Finds New Study

We’ve long known that your weight isn’t necessarily linked to your health.

Firstly, because weight doesn’t indicate how much of you is muscle and how much is fat. Secondly, because weight doesn’t indicate what’s going on inside our body, like how much visceral fat we have (the type that sits around organs and can be problematic for health) or how well our heart, liver, gut, and other organs are working.

Yet, we’re never not being sold weight loss solutions. They pop up when we’re scrolling Instagram, are plastered all over train stations and are sometimes recommended by medical professionals.

Why, given there are so many other markers of health that are much more interesting and, importantly, useful for indicating our health? Well, that’s a big question. Instead, let’s look at a more practical question: what exactly are those better measurements for an insight into how healthy we are?

That’s exactly what a new study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at.

The Study

The study, from researchers at the University of Virginia, was a systematic review and meta-analysis of research looking at whether cardiorespiratory fitness or body mass index (BMI) had a bigger effect on cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality risk.

They were looking at this because obesity rates have increased significantly over the past four decades, with roughly two in five adults now classified as overweight or obese. With that, more people are at risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.

Public health strategy tends to involve promoting weight loss to increase health outcomes for these people. The problem? Many regain weight within 10 years, and intentional weight loss alone has not consistently shown improvements in mortality risk.

One thing that has been proven to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and death is being fit – so much so that the authors of this study suggested it could be the fifth ‘vital sign’.

While studies have already been done comparing BMI to fitness before, a lot of them had issues with their methods. Researchers wanted to study the updated literature to find out once and for all what is the most important measurement of health.

So, they analysed 20 articles, resulting in a total of 398,716 observations.

The Results

The biggest result from this study is that overweight-fit and obese-fit people had the same risk of all-cause mortality as normal weight-fit individuals. A closer deep dive into the stats shows:

  • Individuals were classified as fit if their exercise stress test score (which was either estimated or directly measured by VO2max) placed them above the 20th percentile within their age group.
  • Compared with normal weight-fit individuals, there was a two-fold increased risk of all-cause mortality in unfit people who were normal weight, overweight and obese.
  • Similarly, compared with normal weight-fit individuals, there was no greater
    risk for cardiovascular disease in fit people who were overweight or obese.
  • Unfit people who were normal weight, overweight and obese had a 2-3 fold increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

What That Means For Us

Being fit is protective against cardiovascular disease and dying, regardless of your body weight and BMI.

Read that again and again.

If you need to hear it from a scientist, Siddhartha Angadi, associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development and corresponding author of the study says: ‘Exercise is more than just a way to expend calories. It is excellent “medicine” to optimise overall health and can largely reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause death for people of all sizes.’

The focus should be moving more, regardless of your BMI, and without the arbitrary goal of ‘weight loss’. ‘The largest reduction in all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality risk occurs when completely sedentary individuals increase their physical activity modestly,’ says Angadi.

And if you need another reason to find movement you love and do it regularly for your health, rather than focusing on your weight, they add: ‘Repetitive cycles of losing and gaining weight – yo-yo dieting – is associated with numerous health risks comparable to those of obesity itself. Improving cardiorespiratory fitness may help avoid the adverse health effects associated with chronic yo-yo dieting.’

The Bottom Line

Set goals that improve your fitness, whether that’s Couch25K, signing up to a new gym or training for a race, rather than ones that centre weight.


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