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Robert H. Shmerling, MD Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publishing Do you know your BMI? Increasingly, people know theirs, just as they know their cholesterol. If you don’t know your BMI, you can use a BMI calculator available online, including this one at Harvard Health Publishing. All you need is your height and weight. Or, you can calculate it yourself, using this formula: BMI = (Weight in Pounds x 703) / (Height in inches x Height in inches). So, now that you know your BMI, is it worth knowing? What are you going to do with it? What your BMI...

I read the headline over at the Washington Post (via Newsalert) and I can’t say I was surprised: The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As reddit recently pointed out, that’s almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.Men, you’re not looking too hot in this scenario either. Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. Doing the same comparison as above, today’s American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from...