Ideal weight calculator
What is a healthy weight for your height?
There is no single ideal number. There is a range, and it is wide — because two people of the same height can both be healthy several kilos apart.
Enter your height to see your healthy range
This range comes from the WHO body mass index band and takes no account of muscle mass, build, age or ethnicity. It is a reference, not a goal set for you.
Why a range, not a number
The healthy range is simply the weights at which your body mass index falls between 18.5 and 24.9. Because BMI scales with the square of height, that band is naturally wide — for someone 1.75 m tall it spans roughly 20 kg. Anywhere in it is, on this measure alone, unremarkable.
Where you sit inside the range matters less than the direction you are moving and how you feel. A stable weight in the upper half is a different situation from the same weight reached by gaining 10 kg in a year.
About those 'ideal body weight' formulas
Devine, Robinson, Miller and Hamwi all produce a single number from your height and sex. They are still everywhere online, and they were never designed for this: Devine was published in 1974 to help scale drug doses, not to tell patients what to weigh.
- They output one number, implying a precision that does not exist
- They ignore build, frame size and muscle entirely
- They treat sex as the only individual variable
- They are not derived from health-outcome data, unlike the BMI bands
We show the Devine figure because people look for it, labelled for what it is. If a site presents it as your goal weight, that tells you something about the site.
What a realistic target looks like
In clinical practice the target is rarely a specific weight. It is usually a percentage: losing 5% of your starting weight measurably improves blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol, and 10% more so. For someone starting at 95 kg that is under 5 kg for the first meaningful benefit — a far more useful goal than an arbitrary number from a 1974 formula.
Health improvements arrive well before you reach any 'ideal' figure, which is why a clinician sets staged targets rather than one distant one.
If your range and your weight are far apart
The Docalo eligibility assessment is free and takes about ten minutes. A licensed doctor reviews it and decides whether treatment is clinically appropriate. If the answer is no, you are told why and you are not charged.
Free assessment. Membership starts only after a clinician reviews your case.