Degrees of obesity: how to determine obesity degrees 1, 2, 3, 4

Good day, dear blog readers and just random passers-by! Today I want to dedicate this post to all those who are actively looking for and interested in information about excess weight. An article about the stages and types of obesity in men, women and children (photo), how to determine BMI and degree (table), whether they are accepted into the army and how many kg a person has at degrees 1, 2 and 3. Here you will find comprehensive answers to all questions regarding the diagnosis of excess weight and the prognosis of future life.

Congratulations to everyone on the first day of 2012 and I hope that you will spend the long weekend usefully, and not stupidly sitting in front of the TV. It's time to start doing some kind of sport or fitness in the gym. You can already prepare for the new summer season, because before you know it, spring is already knocking, as they say.

Every person needs to physically load themselves, and not just those who will be discussed in this article. For example, I have a BMI of 22, but this does not mean that I can relax, there is always the opportunity to increase this level to 30, for example. That's why I do fitness 3 times a week, which is what I wish for you.

How to determine the degree of obesity

Determining the degree of obesity in women and men is necessary to assess the severity of the disease. There are several methods for assessing the degree of obesity. Let's find out what methods and how they are used.

Due to our mentality and folk traditions, obesity (obesity) is still not considered a disease. And this is bad, because this condition can lead to more serious disorders in the body, such as impaired glucose tolerance or diabetes mellitus, at a minimum.

“What is the blood sugar level in prediabetes?”, read my article. Therefore, in the light of recent research, obesity has been identified as a separate nosological form in ICD 10, i.e. it is already an independent disease that needs to be treated.

To understand whether a patient is obese, various formulas are used to assess the degree of obesity.

Among the causes of excess weight, about 95% are exogenous-constitutional and nutritional obesity, in other words, these are people with a predisposition to weight gain and who do not monitor their diet. A person who has a genetic predisposition, but carefully monitors his diet and is actively involved in physical activity, rarely gains extra pounds. The remaining 5% are obesity, as a symptom of some endocrine disease.

At the same time, in medicine there are 2 concepts:

overweight
actual obesity

The first could be called pre-obesity; it is not yet a disease, but later develops into obesity. The second is that obesity, as a separate disease, which has stages of development and which must be treated so that it does not develop into something more serious.

How many kg does a person with different degrees of obesity have?

It is impossible to answer this question accurately, because these will be completely different numbers, because not only body weight, but also height is involved in the calculation. Two people of different heights but the same body weight will have different degrees of obesity. Therefore, I suggest you read on and you can find out for yourself how weight and height affect the calculations.

What is obesity

Excessive formation and deposition of adipose tissue in the human body is called obesity or liposis. Excess fat accumulates in the subcutaneous tissue, omentum and other tissues of the human body. This process is a disease that is characterized by an increase in the total weight of the human body by more than 20% of the norm. Excess weight causes psychophysical discomfort. But what’s worse is that a large mass entails pathologies of the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, reproductive and digestive systems.

Causes

The accumulation of excess fat deposits often occurs due to an imbalance between the supply of energy resources from food and their expenditure. Energy costs vary depending on each person's lifestyle. When more calories come from food than the body expends, the unspent nutritional resources are converted into fat. The source of extra pounds can be many factors; it all depends on the characteristics of the human body.

Causes of liposis:

overeating (90% of cases);
physical inactivity (70% of cases);
endocrine diseases;
metabolic disorder;
diabetes.;
hereditary predisposition;
physiological conditions (pregnancy, lactation, menopause).

Types

To calculate the type of liposis, it is first necessary to know the normal weight according to height. A normal indicator of human body weight is considered to be the number obtained by subtracting the number 100 from the height in centimeters. From the resulting value you need to subtract 15% for women and 10% for men. A BMI corresponding to the average norm is considered to be from 18 to 25 kg/m2.

Depending on the indicators of the human body mass index, the stages of obesity are classified into 4 types:

I – deviation from the normal value by 10–28%.
II – deviation from the norm by 30–48%.
III – exceeding the prescribed norm by 50–98%.
IV – difference from the normal value by 100% or more.

Formulas for calculating the degree of obesity in adults

How to distinguish between these two concepts in practice? For this purpose, there are indices and indicators of obesity. Let's look at the most widely known of them and try to calculate the degree of obesity, if any.

Obesity levels by body mass index (BMI)

BMI is the most popular method for assessing excess weight and is used all over the world. It is calculated as follows: body weight (kg) / height (m) squared.

There are three stages or degrees (1, 2 and 3), as you like. In the table below you see the same correspondence between degrees of obesity and body mass index numbers. And even lower, you can quickly calculate your BMI using the table, knowing your weight and height (pictures are clickable, click to enlarge).

BMI can also be calculated using an online calculator, of which there are many on the Internet. They are all based on the same formula, so you can choose any one. I don’t have such a calculator on my blog yet, but I will have one in the future.

Ideal body weight

Another indicator is the ideal body weight indicator. It is calculated as follows: P = 50kg + (T – 150) * 0.75, where P is ideal weight, T is height in cm. This calculation is correct for men. For women: subtract 3.5 kg from a man’s ideal weight.

Having found out your ideal body weight, you can calculate how many kg you are overweight and what level of excess weight you have. As a result, we get the old classification of obesity, which distinguishes degrees 1,2,3 and 4.

With the first degree of obesity, body weight exceeds the ideal by 29%, with the second degree - from 30 to 49%, with the third - from 50 to 99%, and the fourth degree is an excess of more than 100%. This extreme condition is also called morbid obesity.

Morbid obesity

This is the most extreme degree of obesity, a very serious and dangerous condition. At the same time, sometimes a person cannot take care of himself at all. Don't let yourself do this!

For what reasons does the disease occur?

The main cause of obesity is an imbalance between the energy supplied by food and its expenditure, which persists over a long period.
Consuming too many calories systematically causes your body to store them. This causes a gradual thickening of the fat layer. More often, this problem occurs when eating foods high in fat and carbohydrates. The cause of obesity may lie in psychogenic overeating, when a woman, in order to cope with stress, begins to consume a lot of food that is high in calories.

Additional factors that contribute to weight gain include:

low level of physical activity;
genetic disorder of the production and activity of enzymes;
hormonal changes during menopause;
pregnancy;
lactation;
lack of sleep;
chronic stress;
taking hormonal and psychotropic drugs.

Many endocrine diseases can provoke the accumulation of fatty deposits. Often a similar problem occurs in people suffering from hypogonadism, hypothyroidism, Cushing's disease and insulinoma. The problem may lie in dysfunction of the hypothalamus.

Triggers for obesity are stress, menopause or pregnancy.

Distribution of adipose tissue and classification of obesity types

Not only the fact of excess weight matters, but also its distribution. Therefore, you need to determine your type of obesity and start solving the problem. There are android and gynoid types of obesity.

The gynoid (female) type, or also called pear-shaped obesity, is characterized by the deposition of fat on the hips and buttocks.
For the android (male) type, it is also called apple-shaped or upper obesity, characterized by the deposition of internal fat, as well as on the waist and abdomen, which gives the figure an apple shape. It is for the male type that there is a high risk of developing both diabetes and cardiovascular complications.

Type of obesity in women

I’ll tell you now how a woman can gain weight. When gaining weight, a woman can follow one of two paths: the path of gynoid obesity or the path of android obesity. In the photo below you see two real female models with different types of fat deposits.

The one on the left has a female type of distribution of fat mass (a fairly thin waist and full hips), in the photo on the right you see a woman with fat deposited on her stomach and waist, and her hips are relatively thin - this is male-type or abdominal obesity.

Types of obesity in men

If you think that men can gain weight and store fat the male way, then you are wrong. Recently, more and more men have appeared who have a female type of obesity, as in the photo below (on the left is the distribution of fat according to the female type).

Fortunately, this type is quite rare; most often you see “beer bellies”, like this one. This is the most dangerous type in terms of the development of metabolic disorders and requires urgent treatment.

Waist to hip ratio

To determine the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular complications, the ratio: waist size / hip size is used. Normally, for men this indicator should be no more than 1.0, and for women – no more than 0.85. If these indicators are higher, then the risk of developing complications such as type 2 diabetes increases.

Waist measurement

Another important indicator is waist size. Normally, in men it should not exceed 94 cm, and in women – 80 cm. Exceeding these indicators also leads to an increased risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

In addition to excess weight, there are other risk factors for developing diabetes, and you can learn which ones from the article “Explain the cause of diabetes.”

Find out more about our weight loss programs:

By resorting to bioimpedansometry, you will get a complete picture of how metabolism occurs in your body and find out if there are any pathologies or disorders. While you can easily make an approximate calculation of the degree of obesity yourself, data on water-salt and lipid processes can only be obtained using hardware.

Determining the degree of obesity at home

There are several simple ways. By resorting to them, you will not receive exact information, but you will have a rough idea of your figure:

Find a fold of skin on your forearm. Squeeze it with two fingers and try to remember its thickness. This indicator should correspond to a similar parameter of the anterior abdominal wall. Calculate the difference. How many times one is larger than the other, the same number of times your weight will exceed the norm.
Measure your waist. For the stronger half, it should not be more than 94 cm, for the fair half - 80. You can also correlate the data obtained with the volume of the hips. Divide the first indicator by the second. The critical limit for women is 0.85, for men – one.

Degrees of obesity in children

Each person has the opportunity to calculate their ideal weight and begin to take measures to reduce their actual weight in order to avoid the appearance of symptoms of diabetes in the future.

But, however, it is worth considering that these calculation formulas are not very suitable for children and athletes. This is due to different proportions in children and the predominance of muscle mass in athletes and bodybuilders. In this section, we will consider the problem of diagnosing excess weight in small representatives of humanity.

Unfortunately, I note the fact that the incidence of obesity among children is steadily increasing every year. In Russia, it has not yet become an epidemic, but in developed countries, doctors and scientists are literally shouting that overweight children are approaching a critical level.

If Russians continue to adhere to Western standards of living and instill their values in their children, then in ten years we will also face a similar fate (see photo above). Take care of your children! After all, excess weight means not only chubby cheeks and soft, round shapes, but also a host of concomitant pathologies.

Children, just like adults, can become obese in the first, second, and even third degree. This is especially true for adolescents and children in the first years of life. Because it is during this period that active division of adipose tissue cells occurs.

When can a child be considered to already have a weight problem?

If you suspect a child has a weight disorder, you can quickly and easily calculate BMI, which correlates with fat mass in both adults and children, as recommended by WHO. I wrote about this formula at the beginning of the article. The evaluation of the calculation results is similar, namely:

overweight corresponds to a BMI of 25 to 30
Class 1 obesity corresponds to a BMI of 30 to 35
Class 2 obesity corresponds to a BMI from 35 to 40
Class 3 obesity corresponds to a BMI of more than 40

Degrees of obesity in children in tables

But this method is very rough and does not take into account children's parameters. Pediatric endocrinologists use a more accurate method - the use of percentile or centile tables, which compare the weight, height, gender and age of children. Agree that this method is more individual. A child’s body weight is considered overweight when it is between the 85th and 95th centile, and obesity begins at the 95th centile. Modern centile tables were recently created in 2006 based on the Multifocus Growth Reference Study (MGRS). They are created in each country, taking into account national characteristics. They use a standard deviation score (SDS). WHO uses standard deviations –1, –2, –3 SDS, median and +1, +2, +3 SDS. Taking into account WHO recommendations, obesity in children and adolescents should be defined as +2.0 SDS BMI, and overweight from +1.0 to +2.0 SDS BMI. Below I present a photo of the official table for boys from 2 to 5 years old and show how to use it correctly (click on the picture to make it larger). Then you can calculate for all ages and for your child.

So, in the first column you see age - year/month, in the second column you see age in months, we skip the next three. Let's look at the last 7 columns. The median column means the average BMI for this age and is considered normal if your indicator fits into the indicators between the -1SD and 1SD column. If the BMI is from 1SD to 2SD, then this indicates that the child is overweight. If more than 2SD – obesity. It is also available not in the form of tables, but in the form of graphs. Here, whatever is more convenient for you. The graph looks like this. I took as an example the BMI for boys from 5 to 19 years old (picture clickable)

Here you see 5 lines that divide the chart into 6 intervals. The norm is read by BMI, which falls between the yellow lines. Age is located horizontally, and BMI is located vertically. I hope you remember how to calculate it. As you can see, this chart does not indicate SD, but the centiles that I talked about at the beginning. In this way, the old and modern designation are combined. .

Useful video

For information on the treatment of obesity in children, watch this video:

Types of obesity according to etiology

If we take into account the origin of the pathology, it can be primary (alimentary) and secondary (symptomatic). Each of the presented types of disease has its own causes.

Nutritional obesity develops due to:

excessive food consumption;
low level of physical activity;
influence of hereditary factors.

When the amount of calories consumed by food exceeds the body's energy expenditure, excess formation of adipose tissue occurs. Under the influence of poor nutrition and physical inactivity, a genetic predisposition may appear.

Many women use food as a way to deal with constant stress, which in turn can disrupt hormone production.

Female obesity of the secondary type is a disease that results from:

traumatic, infectious or tumor lesion of the hypothalamus;
hormonal imbalance;
use of certain medications (glucocorticosteroids, antidepressants, contraceptives).

A common cause of obesity is hormonal imbalances that occur during puberty, pregnancy and menopause.