I agree. The BMI charts are useless. I was always bothered by the fact that this BMI never made a distinction between women and men. Inch for inch, men are heavier than women, because they have more muscle mass. How can the same BMI be applied to both, except in the most general manner. I think the BMI was meant as a very general guideline, that's why your ideal weight is a range not a number.

As usual they used this tool and took it too far. They love it because height and weight are easy numbers to get so they can crunch numbers and make sweeping and totally meaningless statistics about the number of obese and overweight people.

There are much more precise ways of determining whether or not you are overweight or obese, but these methods are more costly and numbers are simply not available for large population. But the number crunchers NEED this information, so they rely on a better-than-nothing BMI system. In my opinion, it’s worse than nothing.