BMI cannot see your belly, so measure your waist as well

"A healthy weight" is not the weight you were twenty years ago or ten pounds
less than your sister-in-law. There are two ways to get a picture of it, and
they measure different things.

BMI

BMI compares your height to your weight. Someone 5'7" weighing 170 pounds has
a BMI of 26.6 — the overweight range.

But BMI does not measure belly fat, and that matters — too much belly fat
raises the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Waist circumference

Waist size takes belly fat into account, and predicts risk that BMI misses.

How to measure it correctly: stand, place the tape around your middle
just above the hip bones, **breathe in, and measure just after you breathe
out.**

Two people with the same BMI can sit on either side of those thresholds, which
is the whole reason to do both.

The number that is smaller than people expect

**Losing weight doesn't have to mean losing a lot of weight. Taking off just
5% to 10% can improve your health and well-being.**

Ten to twenty pounds for a 200-pound person. With diabetes, blood sugar
becomes easier to manage after losing weight, and **you may need less diabetes
medicine**. Many people also report more energy and better sleep.

And the honest paragraph

**A healthy weight goal is one thing; dropping the pounds is quite another.
If there were an easy way to lose weight and keep it off, everyone would be
doing it. We've all known someone who follows a popular diet plan and loses
weight fast. But then they gain it all back (and then some). After trying and
failing over and over, it's easy to see why people give up.**

Which is why the page's own summary says **willpower is not the long-term
answer** — the failure being described is not a failure of effort, and
treating it as one is why the next attempt goes the same way.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.