Ideal Weight Calculator

Why we do not give you one number

The classic ideal-weight formulas (Devine, Robinson, Hamwi) were built for drug dosing, not for health targets, and they output a single figure with a precision the underlying evidence does not support. A healthy weight is a band, and where you sit inside it depends on muscle mass, frame and what your blood markers say.

There is also a practical reason. A single target number invites people to treat anything above it as failure — which is a poor fit for a site whose users are often already fighting the scale.

The number that actually predicts your outcome

Most of the metabolic benefit of weight loss — improved blood sugar, blood pressure, liver fat, sleep apnoea — arrives in the first 5–10% of body weight lost. For someone at 90 kg that is 4.5–9 kg, not the 25 kg it would take to reach the middle of a “normal” range.

So the useful goal is almost never the ideal number. It is the first 5–10%, held.

And the number BMI cannot see

Waist circumference often matters more than total weight for metabolic risk, especially for Indians, who tend to carry fat viscerally. The usual action points are around 90 cm for men and 80 cm for women. A normal BMI with a large waist is a common and genuinely risky pattern in India — and this calculator, by design, cannot detect it.