Waist to Hip Ratio
 

I have just now gotten around to looking at this metric and I'm very surpised. My waist is 40", meaning at my smallest circumference, and the hip measure, at 46.5, is my largest. I'm assuming this is what is meant.
So, I get .86 for my ratio. The first site I used, Healthline, says the line between "moderate" and "high", is .85 and .86. When I googled with "obesity" as a search term, it reduced the precision to .8. Either way, I was surprised, as I thought I had read that simply by weight, women in their sixties were still tagged as obese in the low 160s or so. I don't know where I got that, since I now can't find any reference to classification by weight other than as a factor of BMI. By that measure, I need to come down another 1.3 or so.
So, the upshot is, I'm pretty darned close to stepping down to being simply "overweight", and not actually obese.

Crossing the line from obese to merely overweight feels great!

I never calculated that before I read your post. By all other calculations, I've been considered obese since I was 12.

The facts of my genetics are that my paternal side grandparents were 5'11 and 6'2" tall, while my maternal side grandparents were 5'2" and 5'3" tall. This makes me rather like a shetland pony if you get my drift, rather than a racehorse. LOL

I've always just done the best I can to control ballooning and LCHF has been my recipe since 1972. I've not always been successful, but I never gave up trying.

Waist to height ratio is also a good overall indicator of obesity; particularly visceral fat. Here's a Diet Doctor article with good directions on how to measure. Dr Ted Naiman likes that metric.

My problem with waist measurements are that I'm really high-waisted. Even when I was younger and way thinner, my natural waist is pretty much the bottom of my ribcage, in terms of how clothes fit.

I wonder if this metric was developed more for men than women
It clearly demonstrates abdominal obesity.

Women come in different shapes - the hourglass, the straight up and down (no real difference between hips, waist and breasts) the bossomy, the women who put all their weight on their hips and thighs.

My eyes were opened to this fact when I read an excellent book on how to buy clothes for your body shape. No example of obesity - simply a matter of demonstrating the variety of shapes of women and what clothing flatters that shape. Their point was "don't buy clothes that are not suited to your shape."

I am an hourglass. My waist will forever be smaller than my hips no matter how much weight I carry. And I have carried a lot.

You are probably right. So much else is! Heart attack symptoms, testing medicines, even lab values: so much of it was based on males, it can be a shock once someone realizes the extent of the assumptions.

I'm on the cusp of normal weight, or so the charts say based on WThR. Oh well.
BTW, I got a page not found error on the Diet Doctor link.

Whoops! Sorry. :o Fixed it. That's what I get for not testing my links when I post them.

Thanks for the corrected link, Kristine.

Increasingly there is an emphasis on abdominal obesity as it has a higher correlation to disease risks, largely because of the higher correlation to visceral fat.

Having said that, there also seems to be an insane drive in lots of areas to remove any distinction between men and women. It's as if by pretending that there aren't any fundamental differences we can somehow make them go away.

That is one of the benefits to using the waist to height ratio as an indication of Health (Kristine's link) it was based on Dr Margaret Ashwell's statistical analysis of NHS records in the UK..male, female, wide age range, the different ethnic groups like South Asian that BMI underestimates CVD risk…it all comes down to one simple measurement using a string if needed. http://www.ashwell.uk.com/images/20...th%2 0tool.pdf

Oh, darn! Me too. So, it's less accurate? Doing it per the linked article, I get .695. Still above the "female at risk" level of .492.
Sigh.

I guess I'm the same. I had a waist and hips when I was thirteen and had absolutely no bust; especially compared to the bitchy girls in my PE class in the 7th grade.
As an overweight (ok, obese) adult, I have a decent shape from the front, I just carry a pretty big belly out front.

:lol: I don't know... I didn't like it.