Quoted: Wajahat Mehal

Yale School of Medicine

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“Based on BMI, Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight. But as soon as you
measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”

—Dr. Wajahat Mehal, professor of medicine and director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale, in the September 6 New York Times, talking about the flaws in the body mass index, a height-to-weight ratio used to diagnose people as overweight or obese. The article describes a new metric, the body roundness index, that juxtaposes height and waist measurements.