Do you know what your current BMI is?
You’ve probably heard this term tossed around a bit. That is because your BMI is a huge indicator of whether or not you will be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D).
Body Mass Index (a.k.a BMI) is a simple calculation that determines how big your body is compared to your height.
A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, though most of the population actually falls well above this.
As you can imagine, a high BMI is associated with being overweight and obese. However, muscular people can have slightly higher BMIs than their peers.
But don’t shrug off your numbers as if it’s due to muscle mass: that is only true for serious athletes of the professional kind.
If you want to prevent type 2 diabetes or even reverse it, the simplest way to do so is to keep your BMI within a healthy range.
Why?
Because all the things that get you to a healthy BMI also stop the diabetes train dead in its tracks: healthy diet, moderate exercise, plenty of water, and good sleep.
Even though this is a pretty steadfast correlation in the diabetes world, not many people have researched BMI in depth.
For this reason, a group of researchers in the UK conducted a study to determine exactly what factors can shed some light on the elusive BMI.
They examined thought patterns of parents and their children and then measured the BMIs of the children.
What were the thought patterns? It was pretty simple, actually, and involved food.
They showed pictures of meals to the parents and asked them how much of that food would be enough to satisfy their child at mealtime. The parents were able to adjust the picture to show more or less food with an on-screen arrow.
Afterward, they conducted a similar experiment with the children by displaying the same pictures and asked them to adjust the pictures to reflect how much food they would feel satisfied with at mealtime.
What they found was that the children whose parents mostly predicted below what their children actually wanted had lower BMIs than the children whose parents accurately predicted a satisfying amount of food for their children.
The authors of this study argue that by understanding the parental thought patterns, perhaps we can prevent type 2 diabetes in future generations.
And it all begins at home with portion sizes.
Keep the portion sizes low, and you maintain the BMI on the lower end of the spectrum. Keep the BMI low and type 2 diabetes is no longer a threat.
In the meantime, try to watch your own portion sizes and work on getting your BMI into a healthy range!
[expand title=”References“]
Healio. URL Link. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
Lipids in Health and Disease. URL Link. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
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