How to Calculate Your Waist-to-Hip Ratio

Video Transcript

"Are you at risk for diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol? This is Alice Monsaert and I'm going to give you a quick calculation to figure out if you are putting yourself at risk. So what we are going to do is a calculation called the waist, hip ratio. Generally speaking an increase of abdominal obesity lists to a higher indication of risk for diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol. So men if you have a waist measurement of greater than 40 or women greater than 35 this is a great indicator that you have abdominal obesity and you are at risk for disease. Basically we take the waist measurements and this individual has a waist of a size 30 and divide it by the hip measurement of a 38 and we get a .78. This was a woman so .78 if I look at my chart puts me in a low risk category, puts this individual in a low risk category for developing diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes. So when you do your calculations again dividing your hip into your waist and coming up with a percentage. A high risk is men greater than 1.0 and women greater than .85. You are at a moderate risk if you are a male. If you are at .9 to 1.0 for a woman, .8 to .85 and low risk for men is .9, lower than .9 and .8 for a woman so it is really important that you get active, that you eat right and you avoid type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol. So again this is Alice Monsaert. Stay healthy."