ARTICLE 4 — Ideal Weight (supports the /ideal-weight-calculator/ tool)
Working title: How Much Should You Weigh? The Honest Answer for Your Height
Slug: `how-much-should-you-weigh`
Primary keyword: how much should I weigh
Secondary: ideal weight by height, ideal weight calculator, healthy weight range, what is my ideal weight
Category: Kitchen Science → Health Basics · Author voice: Ellie
Internal links: /ideal-weight-calculator/, /calorie-calculator/
External dofollow: WHO BMI classification — https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet (or https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/a-healthy-lifestyle—who-recommendations)
Word count target: ~1,700 · Schema: FAQPage after publish
Meta title: How Much Should You Weigh? Ideal Weight by Height (Honest Guide)
Meta description: Your healthy weight is a range, not a magic number. See ideal weight charts by height in pounds and kilos, what the formulas actually measure, and what to do next.
How Much Should You Weigh? The Honest Answer for Your Height
I grew up believing there was one perfect number for every body — you know the one, printed on some chart taped inside a school nurse’s office. You stepped on the scale and either “passed” or didn’t. Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me at fifteen: that number never existed. A healthy weight isn’t a single figure. It’s a range, usually about 30 to 40 pounds wide, and where you sit comfortably inside it depends on your build, your muscle, your age, and honestly, your life.
So this guide won’t hand you a verdict. It’ll hand you something more useful: your actual healthy range, a plain-English explanation of where these numbers come from, and a realistic idea of what to do with them — from a cook’s perspective, not a gym-brochure one.
If you already know your height, our free Ideal Weight Calculator will give you your personal range in ten seconds. Everything below explains what that result really means.
First: there is no single “ideal weight”
Ask five doctors for your ideal weight and you may get five slightly different answers. Not because they’re guessing — because they’re using different tools:
| Tool | What it does | What it’s good for |
|---|---|---|
| WHO healthy BMI range | Weight range where your BMI lands between 18.5 and 24.9 | The modern standard; gives a range, not a number |
| Devine formula | One target number per height (different for men and women) | Classic 1974 formula still used for medication dosing |
| Hamwi / Robinson / Miller | Older single-number formulas with small tweaks | You’ll see them on other sites; they disagree by a few pounds |
| Body composition measures | Body fat %, waist circumference | Better picture of health, but needs special equipment |
Notice something? Every formula built before the 1980s spits out one number. Modern medicine moved to ranges because bodies vary. Any website that tells you “your ideal weight is exactly 141 lb” is overselling what math can do.
Your healthy weight range by height
This table combines both approaches: the WHO healthy BMI range (the wide band) and the Devine formula (the narrower targets). Find your height and see the honest spread.
Healthy weight chart — women and men
| Height | Healthy weight range (BMI 18.5–24.9) | Devine target | Devine target |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5′0″ (152 cm) | 95–127 lb (43–58 kg) | 110 lb (50 kg) | 100 lb (46 kg) |
| 5′1″ (155 cm) | 98–132 lb (44–60 kg) | 115 lb (52 kg) | 105 lb (48 kg) |
| 5′2″ (157 cm) | 101–136 lb (46–62 kg) | 120 lb (55 kg) | 110 lb (50 kg) |
| 5′3″ (160 cm) | 104–141 lb (47–64 kg) | 125 lb (57 kg) | 116 lb (52 kg) |
| 5′4″ (163 cm) | 108–145 lb (49–66 kg) | 131 lb (59 kg) | 121 lb (55 kg) |
| 5′5″ (165 cm) | 111–150 lb (50–68 kg) | 136 lb (62 kg) | 126 lb (57 kg) |
| 5′6″ (168 cm) | 115–154 lb (52–70 kg) | 141 lb (64 kg) | 131 lb (59 kg) |
| 5′7″ (170 cm) | 118–159 lb (54–72 kg) | 146 lb (66 kg) | 136 lb (62 kg) |
| 5′8″ (173 cm) | 122–164 lb (55–74 kg) | 151 lb (68 kg) | 141 lb (64 kg) |
| 5′9″ (175 cm) | 125–169 lb (57–76 kg) | 156 lb (71 kg) | 146 lb (66 kg) |
| 5′10″ (178 cm) | 129–174 lb (58–79 kg) | 161 lb (73 kg) | 151 lb (68 kg) |
| 5′11″ (180 cm) | 133–179 lb (60–81 kg) | 166 lb (75 kg) | 156 lb (71 kg) |
| 6′0″ (183 cm) | 136–184 lb (62–83 kg) | 171 lb (78 kg) | 161 lb (73 kg) |
| 6′1″ (185 cm) | 140–189 lb (64–86 kg) | 176 lb (80 kg) | 166 lb (75 kg) |
| 6′2″ (188 cm) | 144–194 lb (65–88 kg) | 181 lb (82 kg) | 171 lb (78 kg) |
Values calculated from the standard formulas; round numbers. For an exact personal result including half-inches and kilos or pounds side by side, use the Ideal Weight Calculator.
Look how wide that middle column is. At 5′6″, the healthy range runs from about 115 to 154 pounds — a 39-pound span. Someone at 120 lb and someone at 150 lb can be equally healthy at the same height. Frame, muscle mass, and genetics decide where in the range you land. This is why “ideal weight” as a single number deserves its retirement.
Where these numbers come from (the short version)
BMI is just weight ÷ height², dressed up in metric units. It was designed in the 1830s for populations, not individuals, and the World Health Organization defines the healthy band as 18.5–24.9. It knows nothing about muscle versus fat — which is why very muscular people often read “overweight” while feeling and being perfectly healthy.
The Devine formula came from a 1974 paper about calculating medicine doses, not from any study of who lives longest. It says: 50 kg (110 lb) for a man at 5 feet, plus 2.3 kg for every inch above that; 45.5 kg (100 lb) for a woman, same increments.
Both are blunt instruments. But blunt instruments are still useful when you use them for what they’re good at: giving you a ballpark so far off readings become obvious, and a sanity check against the scale’s daily drama.
The takeaway: if your weight falls inside your range, stop letting the bathroom scale run your mood. If it falls well outside, that’s information worth acting on — gently, and ideally with your doctor in the loop.
Why the scale lies to you daily
Here’s kitchen-science territory I actually understand: your body weight swings 2–5 lb (1–2 kg) in a single day. Salt pulls water into your tissues. A big carb-heavy dinner stores glycogen, and every gram of glycogen drags 3 grams of water along with it. That “3 pounds overnight”? It wasn’t fat. Fat gain requires roughly 3,500 surplus calories — nobody eats three days of food by accident between breakfast and bedtime.
Practical rules I follow myself:
- Weigh once a week, same day, morning, after the bathroom, before breakfast.
- Judge the trend over 4 weeks, never one reading. Weekly averages smooth out the noise.
- Trust your clothes too. Jeans don’t have water-retention moods.
- Athletes and serious lifters. Muscle is denser than fat. If you train hard, judge by body composition and performance, not BMI.
- Adults over ~65. Research increasingly suggests a slightly higher BMI protects older adults during illness. Several geriatric guidelines now treat BMI up to ~28 as acceptable.
- Pregnancy. Different rules entirely, set with your midwife or doctor.
- Kids and teens. They get percentile charts tracked over time, never adult tables.
- Anyone with a history of disordered eating. For some people, tracking numbers at all does more harm than good. A dietitian or doctor can offer better markers.
- Insert FAQPage schema for the six Q&As above after publish.
- Suggested featured image: kitchen scale + measuring tape on wooden counter, daylight (16:9).
- Anchor text for inbound links from other HTCE articles: “healthy weight range”, “ideal weight calculator”.
- Table is snippet-bait: keep exact wording “Healthy weight chart — women and men”.
So what do you actually do with your number?
Say the calculator tells you your range tops out higher than where you are — nothing dramatic needed. Or lower. Either way, the answer almost never involves a crash diet, because crash diets have a failure rate so reliable it’s practically physics. What works, boringly, is adjusting how you cook and eat in ways you could keep doing forever. As a food site, here’s our honest angle on that:
1. Cook more than you order
Restaurant and takeout portions are engineered for pleasure, not satiety — more fat, more salt, more sugar than anything you’d make at home. People who cook most of their meals consistently weigh less without counting anything. It’s portion control you don’t have to think about.
2. Put protein and fiber first
An omelet with vegetables keeps you full for hours; toast alone has you foraging by 10:30. Protein and fiber slow digestion and blunt blood-sugar spikes, which quietly reduces how much you eat at the next meal. No willpower required — just sequencing. (Our calorie calculator shows how many calories your body actually needs per day, which matters more than any single meal.)
3. Change the default, not the whole diet
You don’t need a new identity. Swap soda for sparkling water with lime. Use the smaller plates. Keep cut vegetables at eye level in the fridge and the cookies somewhere requiring effort. Behavior science calls this “choice architecture”; my grandmother called it “don’t keep it in the house.”
4. Give it time — real time
Sustainable change is 0.5–1 lb (about 0.25–0.5 kg) per week. That feels insultingly slow until you realize it’s 25–50 lb across a year, and unlike the crash version, it stays gone.
When to ignore the chart completely
Some situations make height-weight charts actively misleading:
And the blanket disclaimer this site gives for everything: we explain food science in plain English, but we’re cooks, not your physician. Big changes — especially rapid loss or gain — belong in a doctor’s office, not just a blog post.
Questions readers always ask
“Is my ideal weight different if I’m big-framed?” Yes, realistically a bit higher — that’s exactly why the range exists. Old charts had “small/medium/large frame” columns; the modern range absorbs most of that variation. Wrist size relative to height is the classic rough frame test, but honestly, you know if you’re broad.
“Does muscle really weigh more than fat?” A pound of each weighs a pound, of course — but muscle is about 18% denser. Two people at 160 lb and identical height can look completely different depending on their ratio.
“What BMI should I aim for within the healthy range?” There’s no bonus prize at 22. Population studies suggest the lowest mortality sits around 20–25 for most adults, but the differences within the healthy band are small compared to the difference between stable and yo-yoing.
“Why does my calculator give a different number than another website?” Different formula. Devine, Hamwi, Robinson and Miller disagree by 5–15 lb for the same person. Ours uses the two most defensible standards: the WHO BMI range and Devine. If a site won’t tell you which formula it uses, be skeptical of the precision it’s selling.
“How fast should I lose weight if I’m above my range?”
0.5–1 lb (0.25–0.5 kg) per week is the evidence-backed pace that preserves muscle and survives contact with real life. Faster than that, you’re mostly losing water and then muscle.
“Do I need to count calories?” Not necessarily — cooking at home with protein-forward meals handles most of it implicitly. But knowing your maintenance number (try the calorie calculator) turns vague effort into informed choices.
The bottom line
“How much should I weigh” is the wrong question, and now you know why. The right question is “what’s my healthy range, and am I living in a way I can sustain inside it?” Get your range in ten seconds with the Ideal Weight Calculator, weigh yourself weekly instead of daily, cook a little more than you order, and let the trend line — not any single Tuesday morning — tell the story.
Your body is a thing you live in, not a grade you got. Feed it like you plan to keep it a while.
Transparency note: this article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed and edited by the HowToCookEasily team. Height-weight figures were computed from the published WHO BMI thresholds and the Devine (1974) formula. Nothing here is medical advice — for personal health decisions, talk to a healthcare professional.
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