Maintaining a health weight for MSK Health

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Maintaining a health weight is an important part of keeping you fit and healthy. It reduces your risk of all sorts of health problems including diabetes and heart disease.

As you might expect maintaining a healthy weight is also really important for your MSK health.

As you may expect being overweight is associated with increased rates of hip and knee arthritis and back pain.

As you might not expect it is also associated with increased rates of small joint arthritis pain (e.g thumb arthritis) and tendon pain.

While the reason behind this is not certain it is thought that a type of inflammatory cell released by fat tissue is responsible.

How do I know if i'm a healthy weight?

The easiest way to work out if your weight is healty to is to calculate something called your body mass index or BMI. The BMI is a number that is generated by considering your weight against your height. Based on this number we are able to tell you if your weight is healthy or not.

You can calculate your BMI below

What should I do if I'm overweight?

The best way to stay in control of your weight is to understand and control portion size and link your calorie intake to your activity levels. This can be quite a complicated idea. The calculator above will give you a target number of calories that your body needs to run each day. If you exceed this number it is likely you will put on weight and if you eat less than this number of calories you may start to lose weight (it is thought that to lose weight we must decrease our calorie intake by about 600 a day) You can boost weight loss by taking part in activities that burn more calories.

A great way to start to loose weight is by using the the free NHS weight loss plan developed in association with the British Dietetic Association. To visit the NHS weight loss plan page please click the link below.

You may also find that using a combined calorie counter/activity tracker app on your phone useful. We recommend 'myfitnesspal' which is a free app which does both of these things so you can keep track of your calorie input and output in realtime.

Available on:

Further resources are available on the Vale of York CCG website here.